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The purpose of this paper is to examine the prosodic correlates of a grammaticalisation process that leads to the formation of a function word. In particular, our case study will tackle the pattern of negation renewal known as Jespersen's Cycle (JC). In JC, a negative reinforcer carrying contrastive meaning grammaticalises to a function word denoting polar negation. We want to show that this change fits in with prosodic change: specifically, the grammaticalised item undergoes prosodic reduction. We test the latter hypothesis on the peculiar Italo-Romance dialect Gazzolese, where mia, the particle undergoing JC, can be used both as the erstwhile contrastive function and as a function word denoting negation (it can appear, for example, in Broad Focus statements). The results confirm that when mia is used as a function word, it displays a shorter duration, a reduced intensity excursion, and does not associate with a pitch accent, in comparison to the original contrastive context. These results show that the change in function word can be appreciated on different phonetic/phonological levels: the metrical one and the intonational one, mediated through the role of the lexical item within information structure.