Most, if not all, languages feature elements which, as arguments or pseudoarguments of a negated verb, emphasize the polarity of negation. Typically, these are minimizers, such as a red cent or a wink, or indefinite pronouns used as generalizers, such as ‘anything (at all)’. This is often a stable situation, but under certain conditions these elements become grammaticalized, first as negative polarity adverbs (NPAs) and, in many cases, from there in a second reanalysis as new markers of sentential negation. These are two separate stages in the development of such items, and the process can stop at either stage. Languages in which both these developments in the expression of sentential negation have been completed are said to have progressed through the first half of ‘Jespersen’s Cycle’. This refers to the common directional, potentially cyclic, development of the expression of negation named by Dahl (1979) after an original observation by Jespersen (1917) based on a number of European languages. The cycle is illustrated with English examples in Table 1.