 For Jespersen, the tendency reflected by the neg-raised interpretation of I don’t think that \(p\) not only illustrates the general strengthening to contrariety but also participates in a more general conspiracy in natural language to signal negation as early as possible. Additional effects of this “neg-first” principle (Horn 1989, 293; after Jespersen 1917, 5) range from diachronic shifts in the expression of sentential negation (see van der Auwera 2010) and the fronting and negative inversion in (1a) or (2a) to the emergence of ambiguities arising in contexts like [neg \(S_1\) because \(S_2\)] (Jespersen 1917, 48), as in “She didn’t marry him because he’s poor”, where the “illogical” scope reading—on which his poverty was the non-cause of the wedding rather than the cause of the non-wedding—can be rendered more or less accessible by the intonation contour.