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In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jespersen's Cycle stage II--bipartite ne + not--to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong effect of region and time period can be clearly observed, with certain linguistic factors also playing a role. We attribute the early onset of the change to contact with Scandinavian: North Germanic is known to have undergone Jespersen's Cycle earlier in its history, and the geographical distribution of early English stage HI fits neatly with the earlier boundaries of the Danelaw. Keywords: Middle English; negation; dialectology; language contact; corpus linguistics, 1. Introduction As is well known, English during its history has undergone the cyclical development that has since Dahl (1979) been known as Jespersen's Cycle. (1) The inherited Germanic preverbal [...]

The lexicons produced by an anonymous writer in P. Berol. Inv. 5008 and Harpocration do not use one another as a source but use a third, separate source that uses the work of Didymus and possibly another person as its sources. Demosthenes employs the phrase being defined in reference to a law. Didymus proposes two definitions with another scholar providing a third possibility. Ancient lexicographers frequently adapted older lexicons and commentaries in their work.

The inference of the evolutionary history of a set of languages is a complex problem. Although some languages are known to be related through descent from common ancestral languages, for other languages determining whether such a relationship holds is itself a difficult problem. In this paper we report on new methods, developed by linguists Johanna Nichols (University of California, Berkeley), Donald Ringe and Ann Taylor (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), and me, for answering some of the most difficult questions in this domain. These methods and the results of the analyses based on these methods were presented in November 1995 at the Symposium on the Frontiers of Science held by the National Academy of Sciences.

A study of the etymology of the stream-name Flooker's Brook shows proof that the term does not actually mean 'fluke-fisher.' Fluke-fishing off the cost of Lancashire, England, provided evidence for the definition offered by the complete English Place-Name Survey for Cheshire, England. However, more plausible etymology would be 'shepherds,' which was the definition given by the Middle English Dictionary for the stream's name.

The genesis of the word 'freo woman' is discussed. It is argued that it is unlikely that freo woman, lady is an inherited substantive in Old English and that there is no basis for admitting a substantive freo 'woman, lady' to the genuine lexicon of Old English.

Ancient Greeks added vowels to a consonantal language and changed their horizontal writing direction from right-to-left to left-to-right. The idea that the dextral majority in ancient Greece developed left-to-right writing solely because writing efficiency was greater is questioned. Cerebral hemispheric functions that might be involved during fixation pauses in reading suggest that horizontal ancient Greek was read more effectively from left to right than from right to left, the other direction in which it usually was written. The same considerations suggest that horizontal consonantal scripts are read more efficiently from right to left than from left to right. The importance of boustrophedon, a continuous writing style, in the development of left-to-right writing and aspects of the reciprocity between cerebral hemispheric functioning and writing direction of vocalic scripts are discussed.