Prohibitive strategies and prohibitive cycles in Ancient Egyptian

In this talk, we present the main prohibitive/negative jussive strategies attested for each state of the language in Ancient Egyptian and we describe the grammaticalization pathways of two prohibitive constructions, from Old Egyptian down to Coptic. The paper is structured as follows. In the introduction (§1), a brief review of current typological studies of prohibitives will be given as background information. Then, we start with a description of the two main types of prohibitive constructions that one finds in Coptic, taking into dialectal variety (§2), namely mpr+V(ERB) and mn-V(ERB) “do not V”. Afterwards, we describe the grammaticalization pathway along which the first of these two constructions developed, from Old Egyptian down to Coptic (§3). Additionally, we provide a description of the main prohibitive (as well as negative jussive) strategies that are attested for Earlier (§4) and Later Egyptian (§5), in order to situate more precisely the grammaticalization process of the first strategy within the successive ‘synchronic’ systems of oppositions in the semantic field of prohibition. In a final section (§6), we discuss more in depth the second, more marginal, prohibitive construction of Coptic (mn-V) — investigating Coptic dialectal diversity — and we suggest a diachronic scenario that could account for the appearance and development of this second strategy.