Jespersen's Cycle and the History of German Negation: Challenges from a Sociolinguistic Perspective

In recent years, historical sociolinguists have started to look at developments that are shared by European or ‘Western’ languages not only from a typological, but also from a sociohistorical point of view (e.g. Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003; Vandenbussche and Elspaß 2007). In the light of the standardization histories of such languages after the Middle Ages, external factors of language change appear to be more influential than internal factors. The traditional histories of most European languages focus on written language (which is intertwined with the spread of the written word, particularly via printed texts) and they are determined by such factors as the rise of standard varieties (entailing a suppression of other languages and varieties, e.g. regional dialects) and the selection and codification of variants (entailing a stigmatization of other variants), which are governed by notions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ language(s). In this paper, we will present and discuss some key developments in the history of New High German against the background of the rise of standard (High) German and the standard language ideology in the German-speaking countries. The case of negation in German will serve as a concrete example to illustrate these developments. 1. Objectives and structure of the paper In this paper, we will firstly reassess the traditional description of a particular grammatical phenomenon in the light of new data and advances in the field of Historical Sociolinguistics. The phenomenon under scrutiny is polynegation in New High German. The second part of this paper presents some ideas on a view of language history as seen ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ respectively. In the third part, some established as well as recent views on the history of negation in German will be portrayed, in particular with respect to the question whether Jespersen’s cycle is a model which can adequately account for this history. Part four presents metalinguistic as well as (new) linguistic data from New High German and discusses the possible impact of such data for a reassessment of the history of negation. From there, the concluding section five will look more generally at the value of sociolinguistic approaches for historical linguistics and will plead, in particular, for an acknowledgement of ‘oral’ varieties in the research on historical grammar and grammatical change. 2. Language history (and the history of New High German) viewed from different angles Traditional textbooks on the history of German – like textbooks on the history of most other Western languages – are dominated by two notions: – a teleological approach to language history, cf. the notion of a ‘unified German language’ and the route metaphor in phrases like “der Weg zur Hochsprache” ‘the way to the standard language’ (Bach 1965: 468) or “Auf dem Wege zur Spracheinheit” ‘on the way to language unity’, “Wege zur Höhe (ca. 1750 bis 1790)” ‘routes to the zenith (ca. 1750 to 1790)’ (Eggers 1986, chapter titles), and – the presentation of historical periods of German as (more or less) separate and ‘closed systems’ (e.g. Roelcke 2009, Speyer 2010). 276 Stephan Elspaß & Nils Langer The first notion (language teleology) has resulted in accounts in which language histories were told as long marches toward uniform standard languages. Language history was largely reduced to the study of literary or chancellery language, thus conceptionally written and formal language. For German, language historians suggested – though this is no longer current wisdom – that standard language varieties existed as early as the Early (court of Charlemagne) and the High Middle Ages (Courtly Romance). Luther’s contribution in the sixteenth century was equally seen as standing in the long tradition of further refinement of the language, and his mythical position as the father of standard or High German is still commonplace in popular belief and non-specialist account of German language history. As regards the post-reformation period of New High German, in particular since 1650, virtually the only interest of language historians lay with printed texts, as these were seen as representing the language proper. From a sociolinguistic point of view, the focus on the printed medium often coincided with a focus on the high varieties employed by some privileged groups of the societies, thus minorities in the respective populations. ‘Non-standard’ variation – let alone language use by non-elites – was usually regarded as corrupt and unsuitable for linguistic research. This notion may be termed ‘a view from above’, and it is strongly influenced by the modern ‘standard language ideology’ (Milroy and Milroy 1985: 22–23). The second notion, the idea of uniform language systems in different language periods, has led to a simplistic view of language change. Identifying distinct historical periods such as Old English, Old High German, Middle High German, or Middle Dutch served as a means of coming to terms with the wealth of diverse data from closely related language varieties from a certain period in time, and it thus permitted large-scale comparisons between different groups of varieties from a typological perspective. However, it has long been known that these categorisations are based on simplified data sets (e.g. ‘normalised’ historical texts in the Lachmann tradition of ‘restoring’ Middle High German; cf. Fleischer and Schallert 2011: 64–66 for an instructive example of ‘supplementing’ such texts with additional instances of double negation!). In data sets of this kind, linguistic variation was seen as exceptional and best to be ignored. The standard language ideology, which promoted the idea of invariant languages, is, in our view, fundamentally ill-conceived. The nineteenth-century idea, for instance, – still maintained by 1 The terms ‘conceptually oral language’ and ‘conceptually written language’ refer to Koch’s and Oesterreicher’s (1985) model of ‘language of immediacy’ vs. ‘language of distance’ (Nähesprache vs. Distanzsprache). In contrast to the dichotomy between the ‘written’ and the ‘spoken’ medium, the linguistic conception of a text can be established only relative to prototypical texts of ‘immediacy’ and prototypical texts of ‘distance’. Texts of a particular text type are placed on a continuum between oral and literate, according to a specific combination of communicative parameters, such as ‘degree of orality vs. degree of literateness’, ‘plannedness’, ‘degree if situational formality’ etc. Cf. Oesterreicher (1997) for further explanations of the model in English. Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation 277 many today – that a fairly uniform Middle High German existed in the Middle Ages was motivated by nationalist historiography (for a critical discussion, cf. Durrell 2000) and the conscious and active disregard of linguistic variation found in contemporary texts. Whilst this practice is no secret to modern scholars, many historical grammars of, say, German are still based on a very limited and, in many instances, artificially standardised set of texts. Studying language with this type of textual basis will result in a picture of linguistic homogeneity, not borne out by a broader evidence base. This has repercussions for our understanding of language change which, because of the narrow empirical foundation, can look much slicker than it actually was, as we shall argue is the case for the application of Jespersen’s cycle to the history of German. The effects of these two notions and their underlying ideologies are particularly noticeable in the language histories of the most recent periods, which for many modern languages arguably begin roughly in the seventeenth century. Sociolinguistically, the modern period is a particularly interesting period in the histories of languages like English, French, German, Dutch etc., not least because of radical changes in their social history, such as the rising literacy rates, the massive increase and diversification of written language data and, in particular, the effects of standardization processes (cf. Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003). Particularly for the modern period, where a wide range of text types is available for scholarly inspection, it would seem to be a strangely narrow enterprise to write language histories solely on the basis of data from historical grammars, which are traditionally based on selected varieties and text types and which do not take into account language-external factors. The modern period thus appears to be an ideal testing ground for the study of language change from a radically new perspective in language historiography, away from a ‘view from above’ to a ‘language history from below’. A ‘from below’ approach has basically two aspects (cf. Elspaß 2005: 3–20, 2007a: 4–5): Firstly, a ‘language history from below’ would focus on the language use of larger sections of the population, particularly the lower classes, and thus it is a first step to a long overdue consideration of the vast majority of the population in language historiography. From the Early Modern period onwards, these people were not just dialect speakers, but increasingly also readers and writers, due to the ‘demotization’ of the written language after the Middle Ages (Maas 1985) and massive literacy drives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 2 This is true even for the 24 edition of Hermann Paul’s Middle High German grammar (Paul 1998), which most contemporary introductions to Middle High German are based upon. The editors’ team of the revised 25 edition (Paul 2007) aimed at a consideration of a wider range of text types. The chapter on negation, however, has remained virtually unchanged from previous editions (cf. the editor’s note ibid.: VII). 278 Stephan Elspaß & Nils Langer Secondly, the concept ‘from below’ calls for a different starting point of the description and explanation of language history. It involves an acknowledgment of those l