Introduction

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter presents Low German as an instance of a language having undergone Jespersen’s cycle, and summarizes the status quaestionis, identifying the gaps in the previous research. Essentially, there is no diachronic study yet of the development of negation in historical Low German, looking at both Jespersen’s cycle and diachronic changes in the interaction between negation and indefinites, that spans the entire period of textual attestation from Old Saxon to the end of the Middle Low German period, when written Low German was replaced by High German. Also novel is the systematic study of the diachronic and geographic variation within Middle Low German, based on a corpus of charters and similar dated and localized documents. The chapter furthermore gives background information on historical Low German and the methods used, and it provides an outline of the book.