Discussing the phase of Jespersen’s Cycle in the East Central German text of the “Acts of the Apostles” from the 14th century

Abstract

The paper presents a language analysis of the East Central German text of the Acts of the Apostles from the 14th century in the context of grammaticalization. Taking the dialectal features into consideration, Middle High German verbal negation is shown as a cycle. The research proves the presence of the polynegation ne … niht or rather ne + other negator, which should be treated as one of several possibilities of verbal negation at that time. Also shown is the trace existence of the old and redundant negator ne (+ verb) and the consequent increasing frequency of the negation niht. The analysis takes the position of the verb in main clauses as well as in subordinate clauses, and the results of the research are always shown with appropriate examples.