The nanosyntax of French negation : a diachronic perspective

This paper presents a nanosyntactic account for negation in what is referred to as le bon usage French (Grevisse and Goosse [1936] 1993, Rooryck 2010) and in colloquial French. The analysis captures the obligatory presence of ne and pas for the expression of sentence negation in le bon usage French, whilst also accounting for the loss of ne in colloquial French. The difference between ne and pas in le bon usage French boils down to a structural difference: ne consists of only one feature or syntactic layer, a polarity feature, whereas pas consists of four features, focus, degree, quantity and proper negation. Only the combination of these five features can yield what is conceived of as sentential negation. With respect to colloquial French the analysis involves that the syntactic structure of pas, encoded in a post-syntactic lexicon, starts spelling out five features, thus making ne redundant for the expression of sentential negation. Given that the use of negative markers in le bon usage French and colloquial French represents two important and well-described stages in what is referred to as Jespersen’s Cycle (Dahl 1979) this account is also relevant from a diachronic perspective