Frequency and the Evolution of French Negation
Angus Grieve-Smith1998, Unpublished term paper
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Abstract
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.
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The Spread of Change in French Negation
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).
Negation in the History of French
The changes that I will be discussing are a small part of the larger history of the French language, and in later chapters we will see how strongly they were affected by this history. We have over a thousand years of records to draw on, from which I will be examining a selection of theatrical texts. In this chapter I will give a brief overview of the sociopolitical history of the language. I will then discuss the overall morphosyntactic history of negation in French, beginning with its antecedents in Latin and continuing on through the present day; in a later chapter I will discuss the current understanding of the semantic and pragmatic evolution of the term. Where possible I will illustrate the discussion with examples from the corpus I have collected, and if necessary I will supplement these examples with excerpts from more recent texts.
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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.
2010. ‘On French Negation.’ In: I. Kwon. H. `Pritchett and J. Spence (eds), Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Berkely Linguistics Society. Berkely, CA: BLS. 447-458.
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.
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The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately. + Models Abstract Typically, the evolution of negation involves an intermediate stage where a post-verbal negator doubles a preverbal marker. The decline of the preverbal marker is generally understood as a form of weakening, through mechanisms that remain rather vague in the literature. A precise hypothesis is proposed by Anne Breitbarth in her analysis of the negative cycle in Germanic (2009). She claims that the acquisition of negative status by the post-verbal item causes the preverbal item to become a polarity marker. The marker should therefore increasingly display a preponderance of uses in non-negative environments. Whether the predictions made by this dual reanalysis hypothesis are supported by the history of French negation is assessed in this paper. Data from 17th and 18th century vernacular French texts (Textes français privés des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles), as well as from the contemporary vernacular (Corpus de français parlé parisien des années 2000), show that the French preverbal negative contradicts the predictions of the dual reanalysis hypothesis in being increasingly used in negative environments. The causes of the decline of the preverbal negative in French are proposed to relate to its membership of a clitic cluster that is susceptible to phonological reductions.
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The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Romance Linguistics Chapter 86 / Negation and Polarity in the Romance languages
The goal of this chapter is to present an overview of the grammar of negative sentences across the Romance family, trying to provide an inclusive picture of the different ways negation can be expressed, or interpreted. We will often refer to examples from many non-standard varieties, so to represent the rich typological diversity that is found across Romance languages. The chapter begins (Section 2) with a general discussion on the clausal positions of the negative markers, considering their variable distribution with respect to verbal forms, clitic pronouns and adverbials. This variability opens up two very general types of questions: the first is related to the meaning of negative sentences, and to whether their interpretation is dependent on the surface realization of the negative marker; the second concerns the dynamics that, from a common ancestor, have led to diversity. Section 3 covers the first issue, looking at the interpretation of negative markers with respect to other logic operators. We will discuss some examples of inverse scope readings that indicate that logic scope is not rigidly constrained by the surface order and that certain interpretations are equivalent to the ones expected if negation would have surfaced in higher or lower positions. For what concerns a wider diachronic perspective, a different way to look at the typological variants found today across Romance is to consider them as distinct stages along the temporal dimension. Section 4 presents some (cyclic) changes that have occurred from the Classic Latin period onwards, including the well-known oscillations in the morpho-syntax of negative markers that have been first noticed by Otto Jespersen. Finally, the chapter concludes with a consideration of the theoretical challenge posed by negation in the nominal domain. The last section is dedicated to a brief survey on the unique properties of N-words, that collocate them halfway between negative polarity items and negative quantifiers.
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