Negation in the History of French

David Willis, Christopher Lucas, Anne Breitbarth, eds., The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. Vol. I: Case Studies, pp. 51-76.

Unpublished term paper, 1998

Negation has long been a favorite topic of study for linguists, and French negation especially so, because of its distinctiveness among the more widely studied languages. In this study I will apply the principles of grammaticization theory, as regards in particular the effects of frequency (Bybee and Thompson 1997), to explain some of the events in the history of French negation. I will analyze a series of texts, mostly plays, drawn from the body of French literature, to show that the shift from preverbal to postverbal negation is an example of grammaticization, and that the spread of the “embracing negation” ne...pas is an example of analogical extension driven by high type frequency, and resisted by high token frequency constructions.

Latin tardif - ancien français. Continuïtés et ruptures. Eds. Anne Carlier & Céline Guillot-Barbance, 2018

1999

French Studies, 1994

Many varieties of French have changed over the years from expressing predicate negation (Geurts 1998) with ne alone, to the embracing construction ne … pas, and then to postverbal pas alone (Jespersen 1917). When the increase in the frequency of ne … pas over time is plotted on a graph, it takes the S shape of the logistic function (Kroch 1989). Bybee and Thompson (1997) note that "the type frequency of a pattern determines its degree of productivity," but "high frequency forms with alternations resist analogical leveling.” These two observations provide an explanation for the logistic progression observed by Kroch (1989). Following Lotka (1925) and Volterra (1926), we can extend this model to take into account the competition between constructions to express the same function. To test these models, I have compiled a corpus of French theatrical texts from the twelfth to the twentieth century. The logistic function accurately models the use of ne … pas in these texts (R2 = 0.899), but the Lotka-Volterra model predicts the post-1600 changes in preverbal ne alone and embracing ne … pas and ne … point with even greater accuracy (r = 0.948 and 0.978).

2013

Journal of Pragmatics, 1991

Reviewed by Alexis Kalokerinos* Laurence Horn's book is a major contribution to the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Not only does the author thoroughly cover negation from the viewpoint of these fields but he also treats morphology and syntax and offers insights into psychology, logic and philosophy. The title can be considered justified by the guided tour through time that Horn offers the reader. Insights and theories from Aristotle on are concisely reviewed and illustrated with comprehensive quotations. This proves to be very instructive: "Those who do not learn from the history of ideas are condemned to relive it" (p. 5), as appears to have happened all too often in the case of reflection on negation in natural language. But this is not the whole point. Through his critical review we gain a new, original approach to the topic. The author proposes a doublelevel framework which can be used to study the complex linguistic phenomena involving negation. On the semantic level, by remodeling and enriching the Aristotelian square of opposition, Horn puts forward a modified model of Term Logic. On the pragmatic level he reformulates Grice's conversational principles into two interactive principles governing both use and change in language. These are far-reaching hypotheses, whose implications go beyond the already very large domain of negation.

Two main characteristics of French negation are (i) that the language is a so-called Negative Concord (NC) language; and (ii) that French exhibits so-called embracing negation. NC refers to the phenomenon where multiple negative expressions yield only one negation. Embracing negation means that the language exhibits two negative markers, preverbal ‘ne’ and postverbal ‘pas’, that embrace the finite verb. At first sight the two phenomena seem to behave on a par. Both in combination with French n-words and with French pas, ne may co-occur. But co-occurrence of pas with an n-word always yields a Double Negation (DN), i.e. a non-NC, reading. In this paper I argue that French n-words carry the same feature as n-words in other languages (following Zeijlstra (2004)): [uNEG]. However, I argue that French ne does not carry any formal feature and is a plain Negative Polarity Item (NPI). Due to the NPI status of ne it follows that ne cannot invoke the presence of an abstract negative operator as that is restricted to n-words only (by virtue of their [uNEG] feature). Moreover, it also follows why pas cannot establish an NC relation with n-word. Since cases of ne ... pas can no longer been seen as cases of syntactic agreement, these constructions cannot act as a cue for language learners to assign a formal negative feature to pas. Pas is thus only lexically and therefore semantically, but not formally (i.e. morphosyntactically) negative.

Folia Linguistica, 2012

This article examines similarities and differences in the evolution of both standard clause negation and n-word negation in French and Italian. The two languages differ saliently in the extent to which standard negation features postverbal markers. We suggest that a convergence of phonetic, prosodic, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic changes in the evolution of French may explain why the grammaticalization of the postverbal marker is significantly more advanced in that language. Two types of n-word negation must be considered: (i) those where the n-word occurs postverbally, and (ii) those where an n-word is positioned preverbally. In the former type, French allows deletion of the preverbal marker, whereas Italian does so to a much lesser extent. In the second type, French allows (indeed, normatively demands) insertion of a second preverbal negative marker, whereas Italian does not. We suggest that this is attributable to the respective positive vs negative etymologies of the n-words. In type (i) constructions, this etymological difference appears to make Italian a negative-concord language from the outset. In contrast, negative concord in Modern French has, to a large extent, developed gradually out of what was originally a reinforcement of standard negation by positive items with scalar properties. Our analysis suggests that the pace and form of grammaticalization cannot be attributed to any single cause, but is rather the result of a confluence of formal and functional factors.