November 18: Katerina Chatzopoulos

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is happy to welcome Katerina Chatzopoulos (Chicago, graduate student) for this term’s final talk.

DATE: November 18, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

`Redefining Jespersen’s Cycle

The goal of this talk is to provide a semantic refinement of the Negative Cycle, known as Jespersen’s cycle (Jespersen 1917, 1924), through a definition that spells out and formalizes a background assumption in current leading research (van der Auwera 2009, 2010, van Gelderen 2008, 2011, Kiparsky & Condoravdi 2007): that the cyclicity of the phenomenon is semantic in nature and independent from its morphosyntactic realization in each one of its crosslinguistic manifestations. Although the assumptions and findings of this study are in agreement with generative outlooks on grammaticalization (Roberts & Roussou 2003, van Gelderen 2004), the representations are influenced by Autolexical Grammar (Sadock 1991, Sadock & Schiller 1993), as this allows a better visualization of the diachronic processes involved (instances of leftward lexical micromovement) and enables us to capture the notion of multiple dominance without reference to checking or agreement.

The proposed definition, abstracts away from the exact realization of the Negative cycle in French (Bréal 1897/1900, Clarke 1904, Horn 1989) and other typical Jespersen languages (e.g. English, Horn 1989, Wallage 2005; Dutch, Hoeksema 1997, Zeijlstra 2004; Egyptian, Gardiner 1903; Old Norse, van Gelderen 2008; Arabic and Berber, Lucas 2007) and views Jespersen’s cycle as a diachronic process that targets intensified predicate negation and elevates it to propositional. Motivation comes from the history of Greek, where negator renewal took place through a former emphatic, yet non discontinuous form of negation: the negative indefinite udhen, that followed the path from negative indefinite, to negative adverb, to sentential negation. This definition is all inclusive and accommodates not only for Greek, but a number of other languages in which negator renewal deviates in one way or another from the prototypical case of French (Chinese, Semitic languages, Athabaskan, German and Bantu languages).

Intensified negation (referred to as ‘emphatic negation’ in the relevant literature) is viewed here as a scale evoking or alternative evoking operation that specializes on scalar predicates, predicates that are gradable or allow for some sort of quantification. Intensified negation, e.g. ‘John didn’t drink at all’, literally negates the endpoint of a scale and everything to its left by implicature (if a Horn scale). It is shown that once the intensified form of negation loses this specialization and applies to all sorts of predicates, quantifiable and not, then it can be safely diagnosed as plain propositional negation. Thus the particular sort of semantic bleaching found in Jespersen’s cycle involves loss of reference to a scale. The exact mechanism of Jespersen’s Cycle can be formalized as involving: (a) lexicalization of the standard of comparison (cf. Kennedy & Levin 2008) and (b) re-application of the measure function. Akin in this sense is the diachronic development of other scale evoking linguistic operations in which regular renewal has been attested: comparatives (Paradis 2003), diminutives (Savickiene 1998) and honorifics (Traugott & Dasher 2002). This approach unites typical and atypical Jespersen’s cycle manifestations and views the Jespersen processes as an instance of a broader tendency active in natural language in general: scalar endpoint lexicalization followed by degree reinforcement.