The Arabic Negative Cycle: An Example of Historical Changes in the Arabic Language

(Mohammed Alluhaybi)

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Abstract

This study considers negation in 47 modern Arabic varieties. The types of negation investigated are standard negation and non-verbal negation. The study reveals that negation in Arabic is undergoing a cycle in addition to the Jespersen’s Cycle, which has already been identified by several studies. In the first stage of this additional cycle, a single negator is used to negate both verbal and non-verbal clauses. In the second stage, this negator is attached to a personal pronoun to negate non-verbal clauses only. In the third stage, a new single morpheme is coined and generalised to negate any non-verbal clause. In the fourth stage, this new morpheme is used to negate certain types of verbal clauses. In the last stage, verbal and non-verbal clauses return to be negated similarly, and this newly coined morpheme can negate both of them. In the study, this cycle is referred to as the Arabic negative cycle.

KEYWORDS
Arabic dialects, contrastive linguistics, Arabic negation, historical linguistic, standard negation, synchronic linguistics

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