Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1200

Title: Negation in English and other languages
Series Title: Classics in Linguistics
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Language Science Press
http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/501

Author(s): Otto Jespersen; Brett Reynolds, Peter Evans; Olli O. Silvennoinen

Reviewer: Anastasiia Petrenko

SUMMARY

This book, “Negation in English and Other Languages” (henceforth “Negation”), written by Otto Jespersen and edited by Brett Reynolds and Peter Evans with an introduction by Olli O. Silvennoinen, is a newly second edition of Jespersen’s 1917 classic. This edition makes this work more accessible, preserving its historical significance and enhancing its usability and applicability for contemporary readers.

The editors’ contributions are significant. The new edition is supplemented with a new introduction to familiarize the reader with the context and limitations of the time when the book was written; the method of transcription has been modernized and glosses added to the examples extracted from languages other than English; the bibliography has been made more accessible by adding links to internet resources, as well as some new section titles; the abbreviations have been made clearer; some main body paragraphs have been moved to footnotes; and the citations have been verified by double-checking the page from which the examples were taken. These editorial changes enhance the book’s accessibility without refuting Jespersen’s original arguments.

Silvennoinen’s introductory essay provides readers with essential context. It offers a concise biography of Jespersen, defining the place of “Negation” within the broader framework of his “Modern English Grammar” and outlining Jespersen’s contributions to the field of linguistics. It further explains the most important terms used in the book and notions touched upon by Jespersen, as well as mentioning some problems with the work. This introduction performs valuable functions: it helps novice readers orient themselves within the historical context of Jespersen’s work, while also highlighting the aspects of his analyses that remain relevant to current scholarship.

“Negation” spans over thirteen chapters, which can be grouped into three main clusters: (i) diachronic and typological perspectives on negation (Chapters 1-3), (ii) pragmatic and syntactic phenomena (Chapters 4-10), and (iii) the peculiarities of English negation (Chapters 11-13). Together, these chapters provide a broad perspective on the concept of negation in a wide range of languages through Jespersen’s detailed analysis and compelling examples.

Chapters 1-3: Diachronic tendencies and Jespersen’s Cycle

The opening chapters lay out the foundations of Jespersen’s approach. The first chapter introduces the general tendencies of how negative expressions are formed and develop, using the material from Latin, German, English, French, Danish and other Scandinavian languages. Jespersen identifies a recurrent diachronic pattern in which a negative marker weakens over time and then is reinforced by an additional word, which afterwards will go through the same stages as the original word. This process, later termed “Jespersen’s Cycle” (Dahl 2009: 88), has become one of the most widely cited concepts in linguistics. Chapter 2, “Strengthening of Negatives”, builds up on this framework, showing how phonetic and semantic reinforcement processes contribute to the strengthening of negatives, and how positive expressions can diachronically shift into negatives. Jespersen starts with a classical example, illustrating how a phonetic change conveying no additional meaning substituted “ne” with “non” in Latin. He explains such an addition of a consonant as a way of making the negative item to sound more impressive. Then, he elaborates on the role of subjuncts, defined as a modifier of a modifier as in “extremely hot weather” (Jespersen 2025: 13), and underlines that such an exaggeration makes negation more productive. Furthermore, using the French material, he sheds some light on how some adverbs gain the tendency to be used not only with a certain group of verbs but with all the representatives of the semantic category (Jespersen 2025: 14). This elaboration and justification of the tendencies with examples allows the reader, especially university students and those new to the topic of negation, to get the bigger picture both diachronically and synchronically. Chapter 3, “Positive becomes Negative”, provides the reader with case studies in French and Spanish, supplemented by a contrastive analysis with Germanic and Norse languages. This chapter demonstrates Jespersen’s comparative and historical reach, continuing to drive research in the field of language change.

Chapter 4-10: Pragmatics, syntax and semantic peculiarities of negation

The central chapters turn to more fine-grained aspects of negation. Chapter 4, “Indirect and Incomplete Negation”, takes into account various methods through which negation can be expressed directly and indirectly. In terms of indirect negation, Jespersen explores questions, imperatives, different collocations (like “you won’t catch me doing it” and “excuse me doing”), ironic incredulity, ironic “much”, the word “the devil”, hypothetical clauses, continuation with “much less”, and incomplete negation (sentences with “hardly”). All the cases are illustrated with extensive examples from older literature (like Shakespeare), as well as more modern authors (like Shaw). Again, all English examples are compared and contrasted in detail with instances from other languages. Jespersen’s intuitions here are often ahead of his time and resemble the principles that will be known later as Gricean implicature (Grice 1975) and scalar implicature (Horn 1989; McCawley 1995). Chapter 5 addresses the distinction between special and nexal negation, grappling with questions of scope that remain central in semantics today. Chapter 6, “Negative Attraction”, sheds more light on the co-occurrence of colloquial language practices and literary approaches to forming negation. The question is addressed based on material from not only English but also Spanish, Danish, and Latin. Chapter 7 offers a typology of double negation – distinguishing languages where it yields affirmation from those where it strengthens negation. Jespersen remains sensitive to nuances of emphasis and emotional force, noting that double negation sometimes intensifies rather than cancels the negative meaning of the sentence. In Chapter 8, “The Meaning of Negation”, Jespersen explores semantic and pragmatic extensions and argues that negation does not always lead to the contrary meaning, backing it up with the examples of numerals, adjectives, pronouns, quantifiers and modal verbs. Chapter 9, “Weakened Negatives”, focuses on cases in which negative forms do not negate but, in contrast, confirm that the event will take place. He also brings up the topic of politeness and how negative forms serve the role of sounding less rude (like “not at all” in English).

In Chapter 10, negative connectives are analysed. Jespersen provides the reader with a schema of all the different ways in which connectives can be applied. Again, these chapters demonstrate Jespersen’s attentiveness to semantics and discourse, drawing extensively on literary examples.

Chapters 11-13: Negation in English

The final part of the book focuses in on English. Chapter 11, “English Verbal Forms in n’t”, deals with the position of “not” in an English sentence, both the full form and the contraction. He also pays particular attention to the colloquial negation form “ain’t’” and tracks its development in written sources – from being first a vulgar form to then being used by educated speakers as well.

Chapter 12 is entirely dedicated to “but” and its negative force. A distinguishing feature of this and the previous chapter is that they contain only examples from English, without any contrastive comparison from other languages.

Chapter 13, “Negative Prefixes”, however, sheds more light on morphological forms of negation in different languages.

The book concludes with an appendix on negative lexical items and a list of sources, as well as references, a name index and a language index.

EVALUATION

In this well-written book, Otto Jespersen provides the reader with a detailed analysis of how negation has developed and is used in English and other languages. The book is well-structured: the reader is first provided with the bigger picture of the concept of negation in general and then is motivated to study deeply the material of English in the concluding chapters. All the assumptions and claims of Otto Jespersen are backed up by extended examples from written sources from the 10th century to the 20th century, which allows the reader to analyse the concept of negation synchronically and diachronically. The first chapter and the last three chapters are especially valuable for novice linguists who want to learn more about negation and English and take their first steps towards the contrastive analysis of negation in different European languages. The material covered in the book from Chapter 2 to Chapter 10 could be particularly beneficial for graduate students who have more experience in the semantics and syntax of negation, as it provides them with contrastive analysis of negation in different languages over a broad period of time.

The scholarly value of this volume lies not only in Jespersen’s original insights but also in the broad scope of his research, which later contributed to the development of a number of theories. First of all, his assumptions and analyses of incomplete and indirect methods of negation would be later shaped as Gricean implicature (Grice 1975) and scalar implicature (Horn 1989; McCawley 1995). Secondly, his comments on the different types of double negation have contributed to the field of politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987). Last but not least, his treatment of quantifiers and modals is directly relevant to the current debates in dynamic semantics and Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005), for which the question of their context-dependence is central.

Overall, Jespersen’s book succeeds in shedding more light on the notion of negation and recommends itself as an accessible, detailed and reliable source for the intended reader. The new edition has also enhanced its availability, as the editors checked the cited pages mentioned in the source and reference lists and added hyperlinks to online versions of references where possible.

However, some limitations are inevitable. Jespersen sometimes blurs the line between semantic meaning, pragmatic inference and syntactic features, relying heavily on the analysis from the perspective of phonetics for some cases. Also, despite the editors’ clarifications, the distribution of explanatory footnotes is uneven. While some difficult terms are explained (e.g. footnote 2 on page 5), Chapters 4 and 5, full of terms differentiating various types of negation, do not include enough footnotes; explanatory footnotes would be particular beneficial for potential readers who are novice linguists, but the footnotes presented focus mostly on typographical errors.

This edition makes clear several avenues for further research. First of all, as it focuses on European languages only, it leaves a typological gap and requires further exploration in the field of other languages. Secondly, Jespersen relies mostly on literary examples, which results in the need for further extended analysis of the corpus material, including different oral and written genres. Thirdly, Jespersen’s intuitions about inference and scalar implicature can be re-examined within the frameworks of Gricean implicature, Horn’s scales and Default Semantics.

In sum, Jespersen’s volume is an indispensable source for anyone who is interested in the topic of negation. The new edition of the classic work has met my expectations, giving me valuable insights that enhanced my understanding of different ways of forming and applying negation in different languages, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Whether for novice readers or experienced researchers, this book significantly contributes to linguistics.

REFERENCES

Brown, P. & Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dahl, Osten. 2009. Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe. Linguistics. 79-106. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1979.17.1-2.79 (21 August 2025)

Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and Conversation. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. 41-58.

Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jespersen, Otto. 2025. Negation in English and Other Languages. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Jaszczolt, Kasia M. 2005. Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McCawley, James D. 1995. Jespersen’s 1917 monograph on negation. Word. 29-39.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Anastasiia Petrenko is a PhD Candidate in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge where she writes a thesis on the concept of time and temporal adverbs in different languages and teaches semantics and pragmatics to undergraduate students. Anastasiia’s research interests combine semantic and pragmatic ambiguities, corpus studies, discourse analysis and cross-linguistic variation.