Jespersen’s Cycle of Negation and the Relative Chronology of Old Frisian Texts and Manuscripts

Abstract

This article presents a quantitative syntactic investigation of nega­tion in The Law of the Skelta in the redaction of Unia. This text was chosen because it has been claimed to be relatively old, compared to other Old Frisian texts. All negative clauses from this text were entered into a database, and these clauses were analysed within the framework of Jespersen’s chrono­logical Cycle of Negation. Four diagnostics are derived from Jespersen’s Cycle for indicating whether a text is relatively old: 

• High frequency of phase 1 single negation, that is, the clitic negation (ne/ni) which is placed before the finite verb; 

• Low frequency of phase 3 adverb negation (‘not’) and article negation (‘no’); 

• High frequency of the full form of the negative clitic ni as opposed to the reduced form ne; 

• Low frequency of negative contraction (of negative clitic and some finite verbs). 

All four diagnostics indicate that The Law of the Skelta is indeed a very old text. The results for The Law of the Skelta are compared to two other texts: the text The 17 Statutes in Unia and the text collection Riustringen 1. It turns out that The Law of the Skelta is older than both of these, as far as the evi­dence from the chronological Cycle of Negation is concerned.