'Giving a rat's' about negation: The Jespersen cycle in modern Australian English

This study is an overview of the Jespersen cycle in casual spoken Australian English. The phenomenon of the Jespersen cycle of negation is well known: negative polarity items (NPIs) such as French pas step are recruited for emphasis and subsequently reanalysed as the negator, eventually triggering the old negator s omission. Recently, efforts have been made to align developments in British and American English negation with this model, such as Cheshire s description of the punctual never (e.g. I never went to school today) and Hoeksema s investigation of the reanalysis of taboo NPIs such as jack all as negators. Some 4,982 tokens of negation in the Australian English corpora were examined to evaluate the tug-of-war between speakers pragmatic desires to avoid face-threatening negation and the necessity of maintaining functionality in the negator.