In:On Spoken French: An Ashby Reader
William J. Ashby
[Studies in Language Companion Series 226] 2023
► pp. 133–150
The loss of the negative particle ne in French
A syntactic change in progress
Published online: 2 March 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.226.c12
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.226.c12
Negation in French can be marked redundantly – since a pre-verbal particle ne ‘old not’ may accompany a second, usually post-verbal, marker of negation. However, the pre-verbal particle is often deleted in spoken French. This deletion may be inconsistent with the usual typological characterization of French as an SVO language. In this paper, the use of ne ‘old not’ by 37 speakers from the region of Tours is evaluated, and the data are judged by the Sankoff Variable Rule Program (Varbrul 2). The negative particle is found to vary with a complex of linguistic, stylistic, and social factors. The historical record and the data presented here suggest that ne ‘old not’ is being lost. This on-going syntactic change may be dependent on another, as yet uncompleted, change: the fusion of the subject clitic and verb.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The corpus
- 3.The method
- 3.1Phonological factors
- 3.2Syntactic factors
- 3.3Stylistic factors
- 3.4Demographic factors
- 4.Conclusion
Acknowledgements Notes References Appendix
References (23)
Ashby, William J. 1976. The loss of the negative morpheme, ne, in Parisian French. Lingua 39: 119–37.
Casagrande, Jean. 1968. On negation in French. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University.
Cedergren, Henrietta J. & Sankoff, David. 1974. Variable rules: Performance as a statistical reflection of competence. Language. 50.333–55.
Dubois, Jean & Dubois-Charlier, Françoise. 1970. Éléments de linguistique française: Syntaxe. Paris: Larousse.
Fasold, Ralph W. 1978. Language variation and linguistic competence. In Linguistic variation, models and methods, David Sankoff (ed), 85–95. New York: Academic Press.
Gaatone, David. 1971. Étude descriptive du système de la négation en français contemporain. Geneva: Droz.
Givón, Talmy. 1976. Topic, pronoun, and grammatical agreement. Subject and topic, Charles N. Li (ed), 149–88. New York: Academic Press.
Guy, Gregory R. 1975. Use and applications of the Cedergren–Sankoff variable rule program. Analyzing variation in language, Ralph W. Fasold & Roger W. Shuy (eds), 59–69. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Horn, Laurence R. 1978. Some aspects of negation. Universals of human language, Joseph H. Greenberg et al. (eds), 4.127–210. Stanford: University Press.
. 1978. Women’s role in linguistic change. Paper presented at LSA Annual Meeting.
Naro, Anthony J. 1980. Review article on Linguistic variation: Models and methods, David Sankoff (ed). Language. 56.156–70.
Pohl, Jacques. 1968. Ne dans le français parlé contemporain: Les modalités de son abandon. Actas del XI Congreso Internacional de Lingüística y Filología Románicas, 3.1343–59. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.