There Is no First Phase of the Jespersen Cycle ¹

Abstract

This paper challenges the traditional conception of the Jespersen Cycle by arguing that no ‘pure’ first phase of the cycle exists where a single negator operates without reinforcement. Drawing on historical data from Northern Italian dialects (Piedmontese, Lombard, Emilian), we demonstrate that emphatic negative structures systematically co‐exist with plain negators from the earliest attestations of each variety. These emphatic forms serve distinct functions—Domain‐Widening and discourse‐level Rejection or Confirmation—and constitute the source of new plain negators, while plain negators can themselves be reanalysed as emphatic negators. On this basis, we propose to set aside the notion of the cycle as an abstract phenomenon that underlies all observed processes of formation of new negators in our dataset. Instead, these are better conceived as a group of phenomena, which involve descriptively and theoretically distinct shifts in the encoding of different negative functions, including but not limited to ‘plain’ negation.