Fine-Tuning Jespersen’s Cycle*
Scott A. Schwenter
The Ohio State University
1. Jespersen’s Cycle and its parts
“Jespersen’s Cycle”, a term apparently first used by Östen Dahl in a 1979 paper
published in the journal Linguistics, refers to the cyclical process by which sentence
negators increase and reduce their formal complexity in different historical steps or
stages. In the original formulation of this process, Otto Jespersen described what would
later become his “Cycle” as follows:
The history of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness
the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first
weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally
through some additional word, and this in its turn may be felt as the
negative proper and may then in course of time be subject to the same
development as the original word (Jespersen 1917: 4; see also Jespersen
1924: 335).
Jespersen exemplified the workings of the Cycle with data from French, English, and
Danish, three languages in which the cyclical process of weakening, strengthening, and
replacement could be found (albeit not exactly to the same degree). However, it is, I
believe, fair to say that the paradigm case of Jespersen’s Cycle, and definitely the one
that has been repeated most often in the literature, is that of French. Although the level of
detail at which the French case is presented varies widely (cf. Hopper and Traugott
2003), the overall characterization of the change is typically quite uniform among
researchers. In one frequent way of presenting the diachrony of the change, a general
schema of four basic structural stages for the French negative cycle is offered, much as in
(1) (cf. Schwegler 1988, 1990; Geurts 2000; Ladusaw 1993; Posner 1985):
(1) Stage 1.
Stage 2.
Stage 3.
Stage 4.
NEG + VERB
NEG + VERB + EMPHATIC NEG
NEG + VERB + OBLIGATORY NEG
VERB + NEG
*
Je ne sais.
‘I don’t know’
Je ne sais (pas).
Je ne sais pas.
Je sais pas.
It is a pleasure and an honor to contribute to this volume in honor of Larry Horn. It is fair to say that Larry
has been as supportive as anyone of my research—he’s really had no reason to be so supportive, but (#so)
supportive he has been! For comments on issues in this paper, I am grateful to Larry, Elizabeth Traugott,
Patrícia Matos Amaral, Chad Howe, Michael Israel, Craige Roberts, the audience at the 2004 LSA Annual
Meeting in Boston, where it was originally presented, and to the editors of this volume. Any and all errors
of fact or interpretation are solely the fault of the author.
1
It should be noted that there is a well-known intermediate stage, which we might call
Stage 3/4, wherein the preverbal negative (e.g. French ne) is variably realized. Indeed, in
the colloquial spoken language of the present-day, French negation is found at this
intermediate Stage 3/4 (Armstrong 2002; Ashby 1981, 2001; Coveney 1996; Martineau
and Mougeon 2003; Sankoff and Vincent 1980).1
Jespersen’s Cycle (usually as exemplified by French), along with the development of
the be going to future in English, is without doubt one of the standard textbook examples
of grammaticalization (inter alia: Dahl 2001a, 2001b, 2004: 137; Detges and Waltereit
2002; Geurts 2000; Hopper 1991; Hopper and Traugott 2003). From a
semantic/pragmatic point of view, the rise of obligatory post-verbal negatives—depicted
in Stage 3 above—is widely considered to be due to a gradual loss of the “emphatic”
value that the post-verbal element conveys in Stage 2: this element (e.g. pas), over time
and through frequent use (leading to “overuse”), loses its emphatic value and is therefore
reanalyzed as an obligatory element within the canonical sentential negation construction.
The principal goal of this paper is to show that this position is problematic from the
present-day perspective of other Romance languages which have post-verbal negatives
that cannot be strictly considered either “emphatic” (Stage 2), unless this term is defined
in an extremely restricted fashion, or “obligatory” (Stage 3). Instead, the argument to be
advanced is that there is a clearly identifiable stage wherein the post-verbal negative
element is heavily regulated by information-structural factors, and specifically by the
discourse-old status of the denied proposition.
Although the data and analysis to follow are strictly present-day synchronic in nature,
an important assumption of this paper is the correctness of the uniformitarian principle
(Labov 1975), which maintains that “the linguistic forces that are evidenced today are in
principle the same as those that operated in the past” (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 50). In
basic terms, what I intend to show is that there is a good deal of commonality among the
synchronic states of negation in several Romance varieties, and that what ties these states
together is their reliance on information structure, not emphasis (or presupposition; see
below). This kind of investigation comparing the present with the (presumed) past
already has precedent in the realm of negation and Jespersen’s Cycle, but from a strictly
syntactic perspective. Indeed, Zanuttini has already pointed out that, “since the
synchronic stages [of the Cycle] correspond so closely to the diachronic ones, an
investigation of the former will help us better understand the latter” (1997: 14). To my
mind, what’s good for syntax is also good for pragmatics!
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 I discuss the notion
of emphasis and argue that it is inadequate for a complete analysis of noncanonical
negative constructions in Catalan and Italian. Instead, I demonstrate that these
constructions are sensitive to information-structural properties of the proposition being
denied. In Section 3 I examine a related, yet more complex, example of noncanonical
1
There are, however, broad differences between different dialects of spoken French with respect to
NEG2/3. Thus, for example, Canadian French negation is overwhelmingly (99%) NEG3 (Sankoff and
Vincent 1980), while this percentage is much lower in European French, which conserves NEG2 to a much
greater extent (approximately 20% to 40%) in the spoken language (Ashby 1981; Coveney 1996).
2
negative constructions from Brazilian Portuguese, and show how these forms are likewise
sensitive to information structure and specifically how they differ with respect to the
discourse accessibility of the denied proposition. Section 4 provides concluding remarks
about the analysis and its relation to Jespersen’s Cycle. Finally, Section 5 is a brief
postscript in which I discuss a larger issue concerning form-function pairings in the realm
of sentential negation. Throughout the discussion, I will use the labels NEG1, NEG2, and
NEG3 as abbreviations for three types of sentential negative constructions: NEG 1 refers
to strictly preverbal negation (i.e. canonical negation in the languages of interest here);
NEG 2 refers to negation with co-occurring pre- and postverbal negative elements, such
as ne V pas in French; and NEG3 refers to strictly postverbal negation, e.g. V pas in
French. Although these formal options have traditionally been linked to distinct stages of
Jespersen’s Cycle, in this paper I am primarily interested in noncanonical negatives at
Stage 2 of the Cycle, i.e. the stage where the postverbal negative element is optional.
2. NEG2 in other Romance languages: beyond “emphasis”
The term most often associated with noncanonical negation in the early stages of
Jespersen’s Cycle is EMPHASIS: the post-verbal negative element adds emphasis to the
canonical pre-verbal sentential negative. To the best of my knowledge, however, the
notion of emphasis associated with post-verbal elements in the Cycle—corresponding to
Stage 2 in (1) above—has never been defined in explicit terms. Indeed, although
emphasis is a label that abounds in linguistic research, it is typically undefined no matter
what its domain of application. As regards Jespersen’s Cycle specifically, Schwegler
(1990: 158) has noted that “there seems to be a constant and universal psycholinguistic
need for negative emphasizers”. Schwegler’s footnote to this same statement, however,
exemplifies the aura of mystery that surrounds these so-called emphasizers:
“‘Psycholinguistic proclivity’ is not an explanation. It is really an unknown for a causal
factor whose existence must, however, be acknowledged for an understanding of the
process involved” (Schwegler 1990: 239).
It is not clear exactly what stage(s) of the Cycle Schwegler is referring to in the
preceding quotes. What must be distinguished, however, are the possibilities for emphasis
(in intuitive terms) that constitute the precursors or input to the Cycle proper, and the
emphatic post-verbal elements that become incorporated as GRAMMATICAL elements into
the Cycle, such as in Stage 2 in (1). The first kind of emphasis and their corresponding
emphasizers are a seemingly universal property of language(s): the possibility of using
post-verbal elements, most typically nouns denoting minimal quantities, in emphatic
negation contexts as negative polarity items (NPIs). As pointed out by Detges and
Waltereit (2002), it is elements such as minimizing NPIs like a crumb or idiomatic
minimizers like lift a finger that are widespread across languages. However, as noted by
many authors (e.g. Hopper [1991] for French), typically only one of these minimizers
becomes generalized for sentential negation, in the sense of extending its domain of
application to all kinds of predicates and of bleaching its meaning so that the erstwhile
nominal meaning is no longer tangible. Thus, French pas was semantically extended
3
beyond its nominal meaning (‘step’), ultimately to the point where it could combine with
any verb, not just verbs of motion, which are the assumed starting point for this particular
emphasizer. On the other hand, English a crumb is still heavily constrained by the
meaning of its source noun, so that it is permissible to talk about not eating a crumb, but
*not walking a crumb remains impossible. The French and English forms illustrate
opposite ends of the semantic spectrum for post-verbal negative elements: while pas in
the negative construction has lost its nominal meaning, a crumb retains its nominal
meaning in the negative construction. In between these poles, however, lie many other
possibilities. Thus, the English NPI jack(shit) (cf. Postal 2004) is fairly general with
certain verbs, e.g. He doesn’t know jack, My son won’t eat jack anymore. However, it
does not combine well with all verbs, e.g. ?I don’t sleep jack, and likewise still seems to
conserve the “minimal quantity” meaning. The upshot of all this is that there is a finegrained semantic/pragmatic continuum of post-verbal elements, and defining them as
being emphatic at Stage 2 does not help resolve the issue.
On the bright side, one of the few attempts, and perhaps the only attempt, to define
emphasis in the realm of semantics and pragmatics more generally has been made by
Michael Israel in his dissertation (1998) and a series of papers since then. Given the lack
of alternative explanations for the concept in question, I assume, following Israel (1998,
2001), that emphasis describes the high informativity of a proposition relative to a scalar
“norm”—“if a proposition entails the norm, its assertion is informative because it exceeds
what one would normally expect to be asserted” (1998: 47). The “normally expected
assertion” of Israel’s model is the canonical, unmarked sentential negative. Thus, the
informative value of a marked negative (plus NPI) like “I didn’t move a step/at all”
entails that of the unmarked negative “I didn’t move”, but not vice versa (cf. also Detges
and Waltereit 2002). Therefore, the marked negative is emphatic relative to the unmarked
form.
Most crucial to the point of this paper, however, is the fact that emphatic negatives in
Israel’s sense are not necessarily linked to information structure, or, to put it more
colloquially, they do not necessarily “respond” to anything or anyone. While it may be
true that emphatic NPI minimizers are most often employed in contexts where there is an
assumption that the denied proposition is true (see Detges and Waltereit 2002),2 there is
no restriction such that these NPIs MUST occur in such a context. Thus, an example with a
minimizer NPI like I didn’t sleep a wink last night could be uttered felicitously in English
with no necessary prior assumptions on the part of any of the interlocutors about the
quality of the speaker’s sleep the night before. Upon uttering this sentence, the speaker
does create (or invoke) a context of counterexpectation, contrasting what she just asserted
with shared norms (e.g. having slept well, having slept some, not sleeping well but more
than a wink, etc.). The crucial part of Israel’s analysis is simply that this utterance has to
be understood as expressing an informative proposition that entails other propositions in
the relevant scalar model, and, crucially, as denying the smallest possible quantity of
2
I know of no studies examining the use of NPIs in naturally-occurring discourse that could either support
or refute this prediction.
4
sleep. These aspects of interpretation are what justify the classification of sleep a wink as
an emphatic NPI.
However, there are present-day Romance languages whose NEG2s are neither
emphatic in the sense defined by Israel nor obligatory elements. We’ll first consider two
cases that are rather similar: Catalan and Italian (see Schwenter 2002). By grouping these
two languages together, I am not being innovative: NEG2 in Catalan and Italian have
already been considered similar by other authors, e.g. Bernini and Ramat (1996: 17), who
state, “In Catalan post-verbal pas is used to give the negative construction … adversative
meaning on the pragmatic level; its use, comparable to that of mica in Italian, implies that
the speaker presupposes that whatever he is denying is on the contrary considered true or
understood as realizable by his interlocutor”. While I agree with Bernini and Ramat in
their assessment of the comparability of NEG2 across the two languages, my analysis of
what is “implied” by their use is distinct.
2.1 Catalan
The case of Catalan would appear to be of utmost importance for comparative Romance
purposes, since both the NEG2 post-verbal element (pas < ‘step’) and its syntax (no V
pas) are essentially identical to that of the more well-known French negative. However,
to my knowledge, none of the authors who have analyzed negation and the negative cycle
in French—from either a diachronic or a synchronic perspective—have drawn
comparisons with the neighboring Catalan negatives. Catalan could be especially
important for hypothesizing about the details of the path of change taken by French
negation, assuming (as one would be inclined to do, given the linguistic and geographical
closeness of the two languages) that Catalan is following or at least has followed a
similar path of development to this point.
The main difference between the French and Catalan NEG2 constructions is that the
post-verbal negative pas is not obligatory in Catalan, or at least not in those Catalan
varieties (i.e. the vast majority) spoken in Spain, which are very obviously not in a
situation of bilingualism with French but rather with Spanish. Since Spanish is a
language with no “dominant” NEG2 construction, one would assume that Spanish cannot
be providing a model for transfer into the Catalan construction. Moreover, as far as I
know no one to date has claimed that the Catalan negative system is actively changing,
i.e. that it is on its way to an obligatory NEG2 stage (e.g. Stage 3 in [1] above), although
such a stage is certainly a future possibility.
In existing descriptions of the Catalan negative system, no V pas has been considered
an emphatic construction by some authors (Hualde 1992; Yates 1993[1975]), but not by
others (Espinal 1993; Wheeler, Yates, and Dols 1999). Clearly, as in the case of its
French counterpart, the erstwhile direct-object noun pas in the NEG2 construction has
completely lost its former meaning of physical movement (meaning still preserved
outside this construction in the noun pas). As a result of this meaning change, the particle
has been generalized to all classes of verbs, including intransitives and copulas (Jordi no
és pas intel.ligent ‘Jordi is not intelligent’).
5
At the same time, however, this semantic and syntactic generalization of pas is not
unrestricted, and the NEG2 no V pas is clearly not acceptable everywhere the canonical
NEG1 no V can be used. Rather, the distribution of no V pas is strictly controlled by
information-structural factors, as the following examples illustrate:
(2a)
[Stepping outside on a fairly warm day, after several days of unusually cold
weather]
Avui no fa (#pas) fred!
today not makes cold
‘Today it’s not cold!’
[Add morpheme-by-morpheme glosses]
(2b)
[speaker B to A; B believes that A believes the cold weather will continue]
Avui no fa (#pas) fred!
‘Today it’s not cold!’
(3a)
[Same weather scenario as in (2a)]
A: Avui fa fred també?
today makes cold also
‘Will be it cold today as well?’
B: No, avui no fa (pas) fred.
no, today not makes (NEG) cold
‘No, today it’s not cold.’
(3b)
[speaker B sees interlocutor A putting on a heavy coat]
Avui no fa (pas) fred.
‘Today it’s not cold’
Notice first that post-verbal pas is infelicitous in both (2a) and (2b), while the
canonical NEG1 is normal. By contrast, NEG2 is felicitous, but not required, in both (3a)
and (3b). In general terms, the difference between the examples in (2) and those in (3) is
that in (2) there is no “trigger” element in the discourse to license pas. The speakerinternal counterexpectation context in (2a) is not sufficient to license pas, and not even a
strong expectation about an interlocutor’s belief-state, as in (2b), is sufficient. If the
behavior of pas were in fact licensed by speaker emphasis (per, e.g., Israel’s definition),
then it would be difficult to explain why the utterances in (2a, b), situated as they are in
emphatic contexts that run counter to speaker or interlocutor expectations, are
infelicitous. What the examples illustrate is that there must be a salient proposition,
evoked either linguistically (3a) or situationally (3b), for pas to be felicitous (cf. Prince
1981). Following Prince’s (1992) model, we can say that NEG2 is sensitive to the
discourse-status (3), not the hearer-status (2) of the denied proposition. Also important
is the salience of the denied proposition, i.e. not only must this proposition be discourseold, it must also be salient in the discourse at the time that the speaker utters NEG2. In
spoken discourse, NEG2 is uttered as a denial of a proposition that can be derived from
6
an immediately preceding utterance, usually that of another speaker, as in (3a), or as a
response to a salient non-linguistic action from which a particular proposition can be
inferred, as in (3b).
The distinction drawn by Dryer (1996) between activated and believed propositions
is also applicable to the Catalan data. According to Dryer, the activation of a proposition
is independent of one’s belief in the truth of that same proposition: there are many
propositions in whose truth we believe that are not at all activated in the discourse, and
others may be activated but not believed. Such is the case, for instance, in (3a) above,
where speaker A’s question activates the proposition “It will be cold today”, but does not
express A’s belief in that same proposition. As B’s reply to A in the same example
illustrates, the Catalan NEG2 is felicitous in denials of propositions that are activated but
not necessarily believed. (See also Caton [1981] and Fretheim [1984] on illocuted vs.
propounded propositions.)
In some descriptions of NEG2 in Catalan (e.g. Yates 1993[1975]), the construction
has also been described as a marker of counterexpectation. But an interesting property of
no V pas is that it can actually be used to agree with a prior negative statement (Espinal
1993):
(4) A: La Maria ja no vindrà a aquestes hores.
the Maria already not will.come at these hours
‘Maria won’t be coming at this hour.’
B: Efectivament, la Maria no vindrà pas tan tard.
indeed the Maria not will.come NEG so late
‘True, Maria won’t come so late.’
For Espinal (1993), this particular use of NEG2 for confirmation is separate from the
denial use seen in the examples in (3) above. The present analysis suggests, however, that
instead of considering this use a separate function of NEG2 (pace Espinal), it can be seen
as another instance of the denial of an activated discourse-old proposition. Thus, in (4),
the affirmative proposition denied by B (“Maria will come at this late hour”) is activated
indirectly by A’s prior (negated) utterance. That is, from A’s utterance it is possible to
infer a point of view that holds that Maria will be coming at the late hour in question. The
function of no V pas in B’s reply is to index the negation as replying to this affirmative
point of view, i.e. the SAME function it displays in (3). The confirmatory interpretation of
no V pas in (4) is merely an indirect feature of the normal meaning/function of no V pas
in this particular kind of discourse context.
2.2 Italian
Let us now turn to a very similar case that strengthens the claim that information
structure is crucial for a correct characterization of the meaning/use of NEG2, at least
when it corresponds to Stage 2 in (1) above. The form of NEG2 in (standard) Italian (I
will not deal here with the wide variety of dialectal variants) is non V mica. The postverbal element derives from an erstwhile noun meaning ‘crumb’ (cf. Fr. mie, Sp. miga).
7
However, in present-day Italian it has generalized its domain of use so much that now
functionally it resembles Catalan NEG2 to a great extent. Molinelli (1987: 170) also
notes that there is substantial NEG3 use of mica in popular spoken Northern Italian.
In her groundbreaking monograph on the syntax of negation in Romance (mainly
limited to Italian and other Romance varieties spoken in Italy), Zanuttini presents the
following pair of examples, contrasting the standard NEG1 form (non V) with the
noncanonical NEG2 form (non V mica):
(5a)
(5b)
Gianni non ha la macchina.
Gianni not have the car
Gianni non ha mica la macchina.
‘Gianni doesn’t have the car.’
Zanuttini describes the pragmatic difference between these two examples in the following
manner:
As was first discussed in Cinque (1976), the occurrence of mica is
pragmatically restricted to those contexts in which the non-negative
counterpart of the proposition expressed by the sentence is assumed in
the discourse. For example, in order for mica to be uttered felicitously in
[(5a)], it is necessary that the proposition that Gianni has a car be entailed
by the common ground. If such a proposition is not part of the common
ground, the presence of mica renders the sentence infelicitous and its
counterpart without mica must be used…(1997: 61; emphasis added)
This explanation is obviously much more explicit than an intuitive one that states
simply that non V mica is more emphatic than its NEG1 counterpart. However, it also
hinges on the definition of “common ground”, and unfortunately Zanuttini does not
clarify how she is using this term. To see why such a clear understanding of common
ground is needed, compare (6a) and (6b), which provide greater (constructed)
contextualization for the NEG2 example in (5b) above:
(6a)
A: Chi viene a prenderti?
who comes to grab-you
‘Who’s coming to pick you up?’
B: Non so. Ma Gianni non ha (#mica) la macchina.
not I.know but Gianni not have the car
‘I don’t know. But Gianni doesn’t have the car.’
(6b)
A: Chi viene a prenderti, Gianni?
‘Who’s coming to pick you up, Gianni?’
B: Non so. Ma Gianni non ha (mica) la macchina.
‘I don’t know. But Gianni doesn’t have the car.’
8
Most notable in this pair of examples is that mica is infelicitous in (6a) even if the
interlocutors share the common ground—which following Stalnaker (1978) we could
standardly characterize as the set of propositions that the interlocutors hold in common to
be true (see also Kadmon [2001: 9])—that Gianni has a car, that he usually picks B up
with that car, etc. Thus, Zanuttini’s “entailed by the common ground” (again, on the
Stalnakerian view of common ground) is actually too weak a characterization of the
felicitous use of mica, insofar as the postverbal NEG is infelicitous in (6a) despite the fact
that Zanuttini’s constraint is met. By contrast, in (6b) mica is felicitous (though not
obligatory) precisely because the proposition “Gianni is coming to pick up B” is activated
and salient in the discourse context. Thus, mica can be employed felicitously when the
negated proposition is accessible or entailed in the common ground of the discourse, but
the manner in which that proposition becomes part of the common ground is crucial to
the felicity of mica; it is NOT the case that any proposition entailed by the common
ground can be negated using mica. Rather, as was the case in Catalan, the proposition
being denied by NEG2 must be discourse-old (whether introduced linguistically or not)
and salient in the discourse context. In addition, as (6b) shows, prior belief in the
corresponding affirmative proposition (“Gianni has the car”) is not a necessary
requirement on the use of NEG2; rather, activation of that proposition (even via
implicature) is sufficient. Finally, it is also notable that, like the Catalan NEG2
construction, Italian non V mica is possible in a “confirmatory” context like the one in (4)
above.
In summary, the NEG2 constructions in Catalan/Italian are licensed only when there
is a denial of a salient discourse-old proposition. This discourse-old proposition does not
have to be believed by anyone; all that is required is its activation (Dryer 1996) in the
discourse context. While it may indeed be the case that these NEG2s are used primarily
in emphatic discourse contexts (though this is an empirical question in need of an
answer), the notion of emphasis itself—whether on an intuitive level or explicitly defined
à la Israel—cannot account for the information-structural constraints that regulate these
constructions. Indeed, it is these constraints that actually make the negative constructions
in question unavailable to many more types of intuitively emphatic contexts, such as
those illustrated in (2) above.
As regards Jespersen’s Cycle, the NEG2 constructions in both languages are clearly
at Stage 2 with respect to their generality. The post-verbal negative elements have lost its
nominal meaning and have generalized to all kinds of verbal predicates, but they are not
yet an obligatory concomitant of the pre-verbal negative, as they would be at Stage 3.
The important point to take away from the discussion and analysis is that the
meaning/function of NEG2 (or, more narrowly, the post-verbal negative element) at
Stage 2 of the Cycle is not done justice by labels such as emphasis. Instead, there is a
crucial relationship between the NEG2 construction and information structure, such that
NEG2 in these languages is felicitously employed only when the negated proposition is
discourse-old and salient.
9
3. NEG2/3 in Brazilian Portuguese
Let us turn now to a similar, but considerably more complex, case that I have analyzed in
much greater detail elsewhere (Schwenter 2005). In spoken Brazilian Portuguese (BP),
all three negative patterns in the model of Jespersen’s Cycle given in (1) above are
present, but the post-verbal negative occurs sentence-finally instead of immediately after
the verb (cf. French, Catalan, Italian):
(7a)
(7b)
(7c)
A Cláudia não veio à festa.
(NEG1)
A Cláudia não veio à festa não.
(NEG2)
A Cláudia veio à festa não.
(NEG3)
All mean: ‘Cláudia didn’t come to the party.’
Another important difference between BP and the other languages mentioned so far is
that the post-verbal negative form is a repetition of the pre-verbal negative morpheme
(não). That is, instead of the originally “minimizing” nominal element common to the
aforementioned languages, NEG2 in BP constitutes what is commonly known as
“embracing” negation. This pattern is found in other Romance varieties as well
(Schwegler 1990, 1996), and arises via the incorporation of a post-sentential,
afterthought-like “resumptive negation” (Jespersen 1917: 72) into sentence-final position,
with loss of the intonation break between the sentence and the negative morpheme
(Alkmim 2001; Bernini and Ramat 1996; Schwegler 1990). These formal differences
notwithstanding, the synchronic distribution and diachronic development of the
noncanonical BP negatives in (7) have been widely considered an instance of Jespersen’s
Cycle (Bernini and Ramat 1996; Schwegler 1990; inter alia). As I intend to show in the
rest of this section, there are clear discourse-functional similarities shared with the
Catalan and Italian NEG2 constructions which indeed justify situating both NEG2 and
NEG3 in BP at Stage 2 of Jespersen’s Cycle.
Although negation in BP has been considered a “change in progress” (NEG1 >
NEG2/3) by some researchers (Schwegler 1991; Bernini and Ramat 1996), the overall
use of NEG2/3 in conversational BP is actually quite low. Grouping the results of several
different studies, we find that NEG2 never exceeds 20% of all sentential negatives across
dialects, while NEG3 never exceeds 5% (Alkmim 2001; Furtado da Cunha 1996, 2001;
Roncarati 1996). In addition, cross-generational patterns of NEG1 vs. NEG2/3 use do not
clearly evince the kinds of patterns one would expect to find in a case of change in
progress (Alkmim 2001). As a result, I do not make the assumption, contra the views of
Schwegler (1991) and Bernini and Ramat (1996), that a change towards obligatory NEG2
(or NEG3, for that matter) is currently in progress in BP.
Very much like the description of noncanonical negatives in other languages, the
meaning or function of NEG2 in BP has been variously characterized as “emphatic”
(Barme 2000), “reinforcing” (Uppendahl, 1979), “contrary to expectation” (Furtado da
Cunha, 2001), or “presuppositional” (Schwegler, 1991, 1996; Roncarati, 1996). However,
upon surveying the data from BP one finds that none of these characterizations can
account for the distribution of NEG2, which, again, turns out to look very similar to the
10
function of the corresponding NEG2s in Catalan and Italian. Compare the following
patterns of (in)felicity of BP NEG2:
(8a)
[Speaker realizes that she missed a TV program she wanted to see]
Eu não vi esse programa (#não)!
I not saw that program
‘I didn’t watch that program!’
(8b)
[Sister realizes that HER BROTHER missed a TV program he wanted to see]
Você não viu esse programa (#não)!
you not saw that program
‘You didn’t watch that program!’
(9)
A: Você viu esse programa?
‘Did you watch that program?’
B: Não vi não.
not I.saw NEG
‘I didn’t watch it.’
Discourse-oldness of the negated proposition, as in (9), is again the relevant property for
the use of NEG2. And, as already noted for the examples from Catalan and Italian, it is
merely activation, not belief, of a proposition p that licenses the use of NEG2 for the
subsequent denial of p. Thus, the question posed by A in (9) does not have to be
interpreted as “biased” towards the truth of the corresponding proposition (i.e. towards
“B watched the program”) in order for B to employ NEG2 in the reply. On the contrary,
seemingly “emphatic” contexts like (8a) or hearer-old/counter-expectation contexts like
(8b) do not license NEG2; indeed, only NEG1 is possible in these examples.
Further evidence for the necessity of distinguishing between believed and activated
propositions can be discerned in examples where NEG2 does not occur in a sentence
providing an answer to a yes/no-question. In (10), from the PEUL corpus of spoken BP
from Rio de Janeiro, speaker F offers up possible eventualities that could keep the soccer
team under discussion from winning a particular game:
(10)
E- (est.) Quer dizer que tem possibilidade de ganhar?
‘You mean that there’s a chance of winning?’
F- Tem possibilidade. A não ser se acontecer, no campo mesmo, um desastre:
alguém quebrar uma perna, do outro ser expulso, daí, pode até perder, mas
isso aí, se deus quiser, não acontece não.
‘It’s possible. Unless there were to occur, on the field itself, a disaster:
someone breaking a leg, another one being ejected, in that case, they could
even lose, but that there, if God wishes, won’t happen.
[E19]
11
It is clear in (10) that F does not BELIEVE that someone will break a leg or be ejected from
the game in question. Instead, it is understood that he is creating possible scenarios that
could damage the team’s chances of winning. His use of NEG2—in the apodosis of a
conditional sentence—is to deny the possible occurrence of these hypothetical disastrous
events, events that exist only in the mental model of the speaker. The occurrence of these
events is therefore activated within the speaker’s mental model, and in the common
ground of the interlocutors, but not believed by any participants in the conversation.
As is the case in Catalan and Italian, NEG2 in BP can also occur in agreement with a
prior negative assertion. Again, this is completely in line with the present analysis,
insofar as NEG2 is sensitive to a salient, discourse-old proposition; here, that proposition
is the affirmative counterpart underlying A’s negative utterance:
(11)
A: O João não foi à festa.
the João not went to.the party
‘João didn’t go to the party.’
B: Não foi não.
‘He didn’t go.’
The necessity of taking information structure into account for the analysis of
noncanonical negation becomes even clearer when comparing BP NEG2 and NEG3: the
accessibility of the denied proposition also plays an important role in constraining which
noncanonical negative construction can be selected in a given context (Schwenter 2005).
The salience and discourse-oldness of the denied proposition are also requirements for
NEG3, which would likewise be infelicitous in the examples in (8), but felicitous in (9).
The main difference between NEG3 and NEG2 is that only NEG2 can be used to deny
propositions which are inferrable on the basis of other propositions, while NEG3 must
deny a proposition that is activated explicitly in the discourse context. Compare (12)
where both NEG2 and NEG3 is felicitous and (13), where only NEG2 is felicitous:3
(12)
A: Você gostou da palestra da Maria?
you liked of.the talk of.the Maria
‘Did you like Maria’s talk?’
B: Gostei não. (Or: Não gostei não)
I.liked NEG
‘I didn’t.’
3
The judgments here reflect those of speakers from Rio de Janeiro. At least some speakers from the
northeast region of Brazil (e.g. Bahia) appear to accept NEG3 in (13). I am grateful to Tjerk Hagemeijer for
pointing this out to me.
12
(13)
A: Você gostou da palestra da Maria?
‘Did you like Maria’s talk?’
B: Eu #(não) fui não.
I not went NEG
‘I didn’t go.’
(+> B went to Maria’s talk)
The question asked by A in (12) activates directly the proposition “you (=B) like Maria’s
talk”, thereby permitting both NEG2 and NEG3 in B’s response. In (13), however, the
same question does not directly activate the proposition “you (=B) went to Maria’s talk”,
but rather invites the inference that A believes that B went to Maria’s talk. In this case,
NEG3 is infelicitous since its domain of use is restricted to discourse-old propositions
that are directly activated in the discourse. By contrast, NEG2 is not restricted in this
way, and is therefore felicitous in B’s reply.
The canonical NEG1 form (não VP) can be used in all the contexts where NEG2 and
NEG3 are felicitous, and of course many more where the noncanonical forms are not
possible. In short, negative statements that are discourse-new, and therefore primarily
“informative” (i.e. not denials of an already accessible proposition), are encoded by
NEG1 (Armin Schwegler, p.c.). The differences between the three BP negatives can be
summarized as in Table 1, where only NEG1 is permitted with discourse-new
propositions, NEG1 and NEG2 with inferrable propositions, and all three forms with
directly-activated propositions:4
Table 1: BP negatives, by information status of the denied proposition
Form
NEG1
NEG2
NEG3
Discoursenew
√
#
#
Inferrable
√
√
#
Directly
Activated
√
√
√
4. Conclusion
The data presented in this paper from three Romance varieties point to a clear functional
gap between Stages 2 and 3 of Jespersen’s Cycle in its usual formulation (see [1] above).
The varieties surveyed have NEG2 constructions that are neither unambiguously
emphatic (in whatever sense of that term is taken) nor obligatory for the expression of
sentential negation. The common denominator among these NEG2s is that they are
restricted to denials of activated, salient discourse-old propositions. It is in this sense that
fine-tuning of Jespersen’s Cycle is needed: Much of the diachronic “action” in the Cycle
4
Another issue of interest to Jespersen’s Cycle that I cannot deal with here due to space restrictions is the
probable diachronic connection between NEG2 and NEG3. The data from present-day BP suggest that the
NEG2 > NEG3 change, as purportedly reflected by the transition from Stage 3 to Stage 4 of the Cycle (e.g.
from ne V pas to V pas in French), is considerably more complex than previously recognized.
13
takes place between Stages 2 and 3, between the generalization of a post-verbal element
as a GRAMMATICAL (i.e. no longer lexical) exponent of negation, and its continued
generalization to become an obligatory part of the canonical sentential negation
construction (e.g. (ne) V pas in present-day French). The synchronic data provided in this
paper should cause us to re-think the way in which “emphatic” post-verbal negative
words lose their purported emphatic value and gradually become pragmatically unmarked
elements. It now seems clear that this diachronic process must take information-structural
considerations into account, and likewise that the NEG2 constructions in Catalan, Italian,
and BP will need to loosen their restrictions on the negated proposition before ever
moving into Stage 3 of the Cycle.5
Now, before I take too much credit for the linking of negation and information
structure, I should point out that this link was prefigured by—who else?—Larry Horn in
his 1978 CLS contribution, which was later updated in Appendix 2 of A Natural History
of Negation (1989). Commenting on the distinction between verbs with incorporated
negation as in “a discouraged b from Xing” and verbs lacking this negation as in “a
encouraged b not to X”, Horn noted that the use of the incorporated form “is limited to
contexts where the contained affirmative proposition is already understood. Thus, a
denied (doubts) that p is appropriate only when p is a proposition evoked in (i.e.,
appearing in or directly inferable from) the earlier discourse” (1989: 523). While I think
Horn’s analysis might itself need a bit of fine-tuning—it doesn’t seem, for instance, that
the proposition p necessarily has to be discourse-old, but simply presupposed by the
interlocutors—it nevertheless illustrates clearly the intricate connection between
information structure and the choice of negative FORM , a result also issuing from the
analysis I’ve presented here.
5. Postscript: A form-function paradox?
To conclude this study, I would like to point out an apparent paradox between negative
form and negative function, and then suggest that such a paradox does not, in fact, exist.
As a starting point, note that it is a widespread assumption among linguists (specialists in
negation or otherwise) that negative sentences are in some sense replies to the
corresponding affirmatives. Consider, for instance, Horn’s position that, “There should be
a reason to utter a sentence, and for a negative sentence, that reason … is generally the
earlier consideration of its contained affirmative counterpart” (1978: 203). Likewise, in
what is certainly one of the most quoted citations of all time on negation, Givón noted
that “negatives are uttered in a context where corresponding affirmatives have already
been discussed, or else where the speaker assumes the hearer’s belief in—and thus
familiarity with—the corresponding affirmatives” (1978: 109).
The paradox arises upon confronting the positions of these (and other) esteemed
scholars with the data offered in this paper. What my analysis has revealed is that the
discourse function of the noncanonical forms of sentence negation (i.e. NEG2/3) in the
5
In Schwenter (2005) I analyze two examples from BP that appear to indicate that the informationstructural restrictions imposed by NEG2 are actually being loosened in this variety.
14
three languages surveyed above is very similar—nearly identical, actually—to the
function that Horn, Givón and many, many others (see the copious citations to this effect
in Horn [1989, ch. 3]) have argued to be the most canonical function for sentence
negation in general!
So, the question to be asked is this: Why are clearly marked forms for sentence
negation being used to carry out the discourse function considered the most UNMARKED
one by most researchers? But, more importantly, what is the evidence that the function of
denying “an earlier-considered affirmative counterpart” is the unmarked or prototypical
one for negation? This function may seem to be prototypical in isolation, where a
negative sentence is most easily interpreted in this way. However, in stark contrast to the
standard position, researchers studying negation in conversational discourse—which I
take to be the locus of language change—have found that denials of explicit propositions
are actually quite infrequent. Tottie (1991) found that only 14.7% of all sentence
negations in a corpus of British English have the function of denying a prior affirmative.
Even more strikingly, Thompson (1998) found that only 5% of the sentential negatives in
a corpus of American English have this function. As Thompson states, the “data … show
clearly that there is typically NO sense in which a negative clause denies anything, either
explicit or implicit, in the conversation” (1998: 323; emphasis in original).
Taking these findings on the use of negative sentences in conversation into account,
the functional differentiation of paradigms of sentence negators is more readily
comprehensible. Noncanonical forms like NEG2 and NEG3 in the three languages
surveyed here serve to indicate in explicit fashion, via their distinct coding vis-à-vis
NEG1, what is actually a highly infrequent/marked function in naturally-occurring
discourse, that of denying a proposition that is already activated in the current discourse
context (see Fretheim 1984 on “denials”). It is the pairing of noncanonical NEG2 forms
with a noncanonical discourse function that can set the wheels of Jespersen’s Cycle in
motion.
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