Jespersen's cycle (English, name)
expansion: Jespersen's cycle
Senses:
topics: human-sciences
linguistics
sciences
glosses: A process in historical linguistics by which negation is expressed first by a simple preverbal marker, then by a discontinuous marker (with elements both before and after the verb, as in the French ne ... pas) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original preverbal marker, and so on.
Forms: