Cyclical Change (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 146)
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Abstract
Unlike some edited books, the volume under review is well-focused, as the main expert in the field of linguistic cycles is the editor herself, who opens it with a theoretically-minded contribution, in which the key concept of the book is explained and discussed. In fact, this book can be seen as the proceedings of the Workshop on the Linguistic Cycle organized by van Gelderen in 2008. Much of van Gelderen’s research is about economy relating to grammaticalization within the Minimalist Program. In particular, she proposes two principles, the Head Preference Principle and the Late Merge Principle, that arguably explain the patterns which language data present in diachronic change. Historically, the notion of cycles in linguistics is connected to the name of Otto Jespersen, and to his work on the grammaticalization of negation in English. This heritage is still evident in present-day research, as three chapters of this book (out of 13 in total) are explicitly devoted to discussing the work on negation by the Danish linguist, which was neglected for decades until recent times. Moreover, negation is still a central topic of research. Roughly, Jespersen’s cycle aims to explain the presence of one or two morphological markers of negation, sometimes obligatory, sometimes optional*one may think of the French ne . . . pas case. However, while for Jespersen the cycle of negation was very clear, the more robust linguistic data provided by the contributions on it in this book, often based on corpus analysis, show more irregular or even ‘broken’ cycles than regular ones. For instance, Hoeksema (Chapter 2) suggests that ‘the change from nominal quantifier to adverbial negation [. . .] takes place in many (though certainly not all) languages as part of the Jespersen cycle’ (p. 32). Van der Auwera (Chapter 3) solves the problem in pluralizing the notion*the Jespersen cycles*but the picture becomes so complex that the reader can rightly ask if the notion is still useful. However, the negation cycle is only one of the linguistic cycles analysed in this book, the others being the subject cycle (applied to Italian and Russian), the modal cycle (applied to English rather), the aspectual cycle (Mayan languages), the copula cycle (various languages) and the preposition cycle (English). This generalization