Regional variation in Jespersen's Cycle in Early Middle English
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Date
2017-12
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Abstract
In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jespersen’s Cycle stage II – bipartite
ne + not – to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution
in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong
effect of region and time period can be clearly observed, with certain linguistic factors also playing a
role. We attribute the early onset of the change to contact with Scandinavian: North Germanic is
known to have undergone Jespersen’s Cycle earlier in its history, and the geographical distribution of
early English stage III fits neatly with the earlier boundaries of the Danelaw.
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Keywords
Middle English, negation, dialectology, language contact, corpus linguistics
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 52.2(2017), pp.173-201