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The Pragmatic Motifs of the Jespersen Cycle: Default, Activation, and the History of Negation in French Pierre Larrivée Abstract


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5. Leaving stage II: Ne in contemporary French

Despite the uncertainties as to the contribution of emerging sentence negation ne ... pas, the case of preverbal non shows that obsolescence of a form may be related to functional specialisation of a pragmatic nature. This raises the question as to whether such a specialisation is associated with declining ne in contemporary French.

Preverbal ne is indeed declining in French, and has been for a long time. Early texts from Anglo-Norman, Flanders and Luxembourg areas evidence ne drop (Gregory 1997, Ingham in press, Völker 2007). Examples from France are found at least from the 17th century (Blanche-Benveniste and Jeanjean 1986), and become increasingly frequent in the 19th century in informal communication (Ayres-Bennett 1994, Ashby 1981, Martineau and Mougeon 2003, Martineau 2008a). Formality is signalled by the use of ne, which remains available to speakers when they need to resort to it. This is demonstrated by the Posh Ladies experiment conducted by Claire Blanche-Benveniste's team: children invited to pretend to be posh ladies in a chic restaurant start producing different markers of formality including ne (Blanche-Benveniste et al. 1990: 257).32 Other studies claim that the decline of ne is a change in progress. Among many others, the most striking work is that conducted by Ashby (further references to comparable work and a general discussion is provided by Fonseca-Greber 2007: 250-253). From sociolinguistic interviews of a representative sample of the population of Tours conducted in 1976 and again in 1995, he establishes that ne is less frequent by nearly 20% across all segments of the population. That a change is in progress for an item is not incompatible with its availability; on the contrary, the availability of an item is obviously a precondition for it to undergo change.

Declining ne could be associated with a pragmatic contribution over and above its stylistic variable status. The idea is first pursued by Mary-Annick Morel (1994). She claims that ne is maintained in contexts of dialogic involvement. The notion has a vagueness that makes its evaluation difficult in the provided corpus of conversations. A corpus of informal exchanges between friends recorded at home is analysed by Fonseca-Greber (2007). She shows that the middle-class speakers of Swiss French concerned retain the preverbal negative in less than 2.5% of cases33. The rarity of the marker therefore raises the questions of the reasons for its insertion rather than for its drop. Ne insertion is proposed to have two functionalities. One is register, and micro-shifts in register motivate the occurrence of the preverbal marker in the following:


(35) le système judiciaire américain permet cela... tandis que chez nous il ne le permet pas (Fonseca-Greber 2007: 258, example (3))

"The American justice system allows this... whereas here, it does not"


A second, emerging function is the pragmatic value of emphasis signalling speaker evaluation or involvement. It appears mainly in foregrounded clauses with other emphatic markers such as pitch prominence, slower speech, lexical emphasis, contrast and repetition. The lexical intensifier strictement, the use of negative aucune where a more neutral option such as pas would be possible, and the use of ne would connive to communicate emphasis in the following:
(36) j'ai entendu des patrons qui mettaient une plaque au four... qui r'venaient... elle etait brûlée... pis qui engueulaient un apprenti... l'apprenti n'avait strictement aucune idée... il était de l'autre côté de la: de la laboratoire... (Fonsecas-Greber 2007: 261, example (12))

"I've heard bosses who put a plaque in the oven... they came back... it was burnt... and they told off the apprentice... the apprentice had strictly no idea... the were on the other side of the lab..."


which voices the outrage of the speaker at the treatment of the assistant in question.

While the two functions of emphasis and register are kept well separated by the author, the relation between them seems fairly transparent. It would seem that the emphasis communicated by the preverbal negative derives from its register status; the formality of ne would in informal conversation emphasise the speaker's message. That pragmatic contribution should be observable in other similar oral exchanges. A comparable series of exchanges is accessible at the online Lancom corpus34 providing transcriptions of video-taped role-plays between French students. While the interactions are at least in their initial terms directed and take place in a school setting, they offer informal verbal exchanges that are freely accessible and searchable. An examination of the 44 attested ne does yield one unambiguous case of pragmatic emphasis. The following extract:


(37) qu'est-ce que t'en penses de ce film ?

–ben moi dans l'ensemble j'ai bien aimé ça retrace bien l'histoire des mineurs

–ah bon ben justement moi je trouvais que c'était un film euh un peu moyen je ne l' ai pas trop aimé moi je trouvais qu'il ne retraçait pas tellement ce qui se passait avant

"What do you think of that film?

– On the whole, I liked it, it tells the story of the minors well

– Well, I thought that it was a film... a little average... I did not like it much... I thought it did not really show what was going on then


offers a disagreement between two speakers about their appreciation of a film, and although this is signalled twice by ne, it could hardly relate to emphasis. Its definition as entailing the simple negation is contradicted by the intervention of mitigation through negation of much and really: for one not to like something much does not suppose that one dislikes it. The other uses of the verb like do not further the case. The example below provides a mitigated and unmitigated disagreement that contains no ne despite the strength of the initial reaction:
(38) – bon et bien si on allait manger au Mac Do ?

–ah non j'aime pas trop le Mac Do c'est pas bien le Mac Do non j'aime pas [...]

–bon allez c'est bien le Mac Do c'est super on s'y amuse bien c'est pas cher

"So, what about going to eat at McDonald's?

– No way I don't like McDonald's It's no good MacDonald's no I don't like it

– Come on McDonald's is nice, it's great, we have fun there and it's not expensive


A ne is provided in the following despite the fact that there is no signalled emphasis, no disagreement about backgrounded information:
(39) – le weekend qu'est-ce que vous aimez faire le weekend ?

– ben ce que j'aimerais faire [...] c' est faire ce que j'aime bien [...] donc c'est ça que j' aimerais faire par contre je fais des tas de choses que que je n'aime pas faire et que je suis obligé de faire mes semaines débordant sur le weekend

"What do you like to do at weekends?

– Well what I'd like to do is to do what I like. That's what I’d like to do. On the other hand I do lots of things that I don't like to do and that I have to because the week is spilling over into the weekends.


Data are therefore far from unambiguous in their indication of the potential role of emphasis for the occurrence of declining ne in informal exchanges (a confirmation of this ambiguity is provided by van Compernolle 2009). The idea that the preverbal negative may be associated with different pragmatic contributions because of its formality status deserves more consideration and may lead to a criterial test being developed for the proposed values. Such tests may well be useful for formality, which remains the specialised contribution of ne. This specialisation alone supports the view of a paradigmatic opposition between marked and default for grammatical change.
6. Conclusions

This paper considers the question of why new ways of expressiong negation should arise in French to form new stages that constitute a cycle. New concepts are used to frame the answer in terms of the opposition between marked and default expressions and the specialised contribution of marked expressions. The opposition between the marked and the default structure grammatical paradigms, and changes in them correspond to default status being conferred on a different expression. The default expression of sentence negation in French goes from ne alone to ne ... pas to pas, forming a cycle of stages from the preverbal to the postverbal.35 At each stage, the emerging and declining marked expressions take on a specialised role. Such specialisation may correspond to pragmatic values. The pragmatic value of emphasis has been found an ill-defined concept that is difficult to diagnose. This contrasts with activation that on the basis of its definition as information accessible to the hearer, can be readily tested. Explicit activation characterises the contexts in which marked preverbal non is distributed in Old French (converging cases are evidenced by Breitbarth and Haegeman 2010). The presumption that emerging pas might rely on activation (Schwenter 2006, Mosegaard Hansen and Visconti 2007) is demonstrated to be unsupported. The point that pragmatic hypotheses about grammar change must be tested is pressed again in relation to impressionistic suggestions about the contemporary pragmatic status of declining ne, which retains a register specialisation.

Paradigms thus change (and presumably vary across social and geographical dialects36) because marked expressions exist that can replace the default option. One of the reasons why marked expressions exist is to express pragmatic values.37 As every language must have a default expression of negation, the need for change arises when the existing default fails to sustain its status as the more productive, more frequent and more context-independent expression. The evolution in the status of ne has an impact on the emergence of pas and on its own decline, and can be speculated to relate to its syntactic specialisation. As a preverbal clitic, it has no prosodic autonomy, which threatens the perception of the polarity of the sentence that postverbal pas clarifies. It also lacks syntactic autonomy and cannot be used in a series of contexts such as the second member of coordinated group and fragment answers where pas can be found. This might have led pas to be interpreted as the unmarked expression of negation, pushing ne to a stylistic value especially found in the written medium where it is most easily recognised, a value that explains its existence to this day. This means that the parts of discontinuous markers may come to be treated independently, as discontinuous markers may come to be understood as one option. Marked options are maintained, or disappear altogether if they lose their special contribution or fail to become default markers. The well-established ne ... pas does not allow marked non to gain default status, leading to its obsolescence after a longish period of competition.

This work is conclusive in a number of important ways. It substantiates the view that grammatical paradigms are shaped by the relation between marked and default expressions. It thus allows sense to be made of change (and variation) in paradigms and of long-standing form competition. It furthers the idea that marked expressions may be associated with pragmatic values. It adjudicates the debate as to whether the best pragmatic characterisation for marked competing forms in the history of French negation should be emphasis or activation. That explicit activation is the pragmatic value of contexts with marked preverbal non in Old French is demonstrated on the basis of hard evidence. Novel data close to the vernacular invalidate the hypotheses about the activated value of pas and ne. The examination of these provide criterial observations to identify the intervention of emphasis (its affinity with denial, the presumed incompatibility with hedges) and activation for emerging and declining expressions. The theoretical role of pragmatics for decline, emergence and competition of items is identified as supporting the specialised contribution of marked expressions. A notional framework is thus provided for language change in grammatical paradigms, which corresponds to a marked option becoming the default expression.

The results from this work points to a series of new research directions. It would be useful to confirm the activated status of non and the conditions of its decline in a larger set of sources, and to consider whether a similar scenario applies to other markers such as nen or néant. Whether the emerging postverbal reinforcement signals activated propositions is still very much uncertain, and more work using dialogal sources such as the Anglo-Norman Year Books may show that something like emphasis rather than activation is involved, for instance. What pragmatic effects the register status of ne may have remains a new area of investigation. How items can sometimes be analysed as parts of a syntagmatic marker, and how the parts can be reanalysed as different expressions is something that requires elucidation: one thing that is troubling is not so much that ne goes its own way as it were, but that pas and point are in competition while at the same time being two instantiations of default embracing negation. It may be that the default is the embracing negative irrespective of the postverbal element that instantiates it, which would tally with the normative uncertainties in the 17th century about which item to use (Martineau 2008a), and that the default status acquired later by pas effectively pushes point into a marked, regional, archaic and sometimes 'stronger' negative.

What this work has not done is provide an analysis of critical moments of change from one default expression to the next, from default to marked, or from marked to default or obsolescent. How this occurs can however be speculated upon with some level of conceptual confidence. Grammatical paradigms change because an existing marked option is reanalysed as the default expression. This reanalysis occurs in bridging contexts that present ambivalence as to whether the specialised contribution that characterises the marked option can be understood as absent. Indeed, if being a marked option means for a marker to have a specialised contribution, and if the properties of that contribution can be interpreted as absent in a context, then the marker has the potential to be understood as a default candidate. The reanalysis of a marker as default will lead other expressions to become marked. These become associated with specialised properties through use in a context that is convergent with such a reanalysis. This means that it is reanalysis that is the cause of massive frequency changes, and not the other way around. Of course, minor frequency changes may be one of the factors by which a marker is to be reanalysed, but it should be the reanalysis itself that explains the bulk of frequency changes, as there are no data showing a spectacular increase of a marked option or a spectacular decrease in a default marker without there having been a reanalysis of their status. Frequency is a consequence, not a cause of change.38 Identifying reanalysis as the cause of change allows external linguistic factors to be taken into account. For French, the choice of ne ... pas over ne and over point and mie would be explained by the sociological fact of its adoption by the French chancery (Völker 2007). The preverbal marker ne that signals formal registers would have withered had it not been for mass education39 in the 20th century (see data from Martineau 2008a). Social ratification of markers supports their analysis as default or marked, and contributes to their subsistence or obsolescence.

The succession of default negative markers does form a morphosyntactic cycle from the preverbal to the postverbal. Why that is can be explained by the way in which new negatives are often formed. New negative expressions in many languages start life as polarity items. Negative Polarity Items will either follow the negative immediately (as with Latin non from ne + oenum 'not + a thing'), in which case there is a change of particles, but not of stages; or mediately (as with ne V pas), which represent the second stage of the cycle; crucially, things can only move forwards, as any polarised reinforcement can hardly precede the negative. It must be noted of course that such a cycle is not mandatory; it is made possible by the decline of the preverbal default option and the reanalysis of a marked expression that is found postverbally.

The relation between marked and default, the reanalysis of a marked expression as default, the specialised contribution of the other expressions that explain their subsistence, their possible but by no means necessary obsolescence provide a good narrative for cycles of grammatical change. It accounts for the diversity of markers and the extended period of their competition. It tells us what is characteristic of a language at a given stage, to what extent its varieties are structurally similar, how it is different from other languages in the same group and from itself in other periods. Whether that narrative tells the whole story can only be determined by more work on data representative of past vernacular usage, which I hope to pursue in future research.


7. Acknowledgements

This work finds its impetus in discussions with participants of the Leverhulme Research Network Cycles of Grammaticalization (http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/cycles-of-grammaticalization/), and earlier versions benefited from the detailed observations of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, Richard Ingham, France Martineau and Johan van der Auwera, as well as from the challenging questions from the three reviewers and the editor of this journal. They helped me focus the proposals in a number of ways, and any residual vagueness must remain my own responsibility.


8. References

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The Anglo-Norman Hub. http://www.anglo-norman.net/


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1 The attribution to Jespersen is made by Dahl (1979), but Meillet (1912) or Gardiner (1905) might equally well have been credited, as noted by van der Auwera (2008: 6).

2 See van der Auwera (2008) on different ways of counting (sub)stages.

3 which may be completed by the postverbal marker appearing before the verb, as is the case in French-based creoles (Larrivée 2004: 19).

4 Semiological weakening does not always initiate the Jespersen cycle, as evidenced by Greek (Kiparsky and Condoravdi 2006) and Arabic (Lucas 2007). The lack of autonomy of French ne can however hardly be challenged, and this can be usefully contrasted to similar preverbal markers in Slavic languages which have mobility and prosodic independence (David Willis, personal communication). This in my view is a plausible reason why Slavic languages have not reached stage 2 of the Jespersen cycle.

5 As is illustrated by the impossibility of establishing whether ne has been dropped in some contemporary French contexts when a vowel-initial verb is preceded by a clitic ending in /n/ such as on or en (see, among many others, Meisenberg 2004, Rowlett 1998: 169, footnote 1).

6 Demonstrated by the use of pas without ne in interrogatives (Price 1993, Martineau and Vinet 2004).

7 This was the case for pas and point, but not for goutte for instance, which remains essentially tied to ne voir goutte 'to see not a drop', "nothing at all".

8 This supposes that the polarity item is used with sentence negation to a significant degree before it becomes a negative itself. Put forward by Michel Bréal under the term of contagion, this process is documented by Jack Hoeksema (2009) on the basis of items such as squat, jackshit and so on.

9 The type of accessibility that concerns the proposition is quite different from the kind discussed in Giora (2007) that has to do with concepts under negative scope. The synergies between the two remain to be explored. Lahousse (in press) provides evidence that activation can concern phrases and not exclusively propositions.

10 One reviewer raises the question of the significance of the subject pronoun in (5) that is absent in the answer under (4). What comes to mind is that this absence might be related to anaphoric dependency, a speculation that seems supported by the data (Barbosa, Duarte and Kato 2005).

11 There are no extended statistical data on this, partly because notions such as emphasis are difficult to apportion, partly because a representative sample of types of interactions is difficult to obtain. As an indication, Schwenter (2006: 338) cites Tottie (1991) who has found that 14.7% of all negative sentences in her British English corpus deny a prior affirmative.

12 This would further go against the principle of uniformitarianism proposed by Elizabeth Traugott according to which communicative needs are stable across language varieties (see for instance Traugott 2003).

13 These three markers are the only ones to appear in early legal texts, contrasting with the flurry of literary minimisers (Harald Völker, personal communication).

14 The question arises of the diagnostic of the default expression of a category. By contrast to the distributional dependency of the marked, the default is the form which is not restricted in its distribution; neither morphosyntax, nor Semantics, nor Pragmatics, nor register is to stop the item being used as the spontaneous expression of the notion considered. It is to be found with the highest frequency, and as the first option with newly-coined items. Criteria of default status are thus productivity, frequency and context-independence. Productivity is discussed in interesting ways by the recent work of Bargdal (2008) and Elsig (2009).

15 The notion of markedness used here in the sense of a specialised option such as emphasis or activation for the expression at a given time of a semantic category is not the markedness in the typological sense of a disfavoured form at any time across a semantic category by which negation is marked with respect to affirmation, passive with respect to active, plural with respect to singular etc. Insightful discussions of the latter are provided by Culicover and Nowak (2002) and Haspelmath (2006). Both versions of markedness are used in the diachronic studies brought together by Andersen (2001).

16 “dans certains dialectes de la Val Bormida, les trois phases du cycle de Jespersen sont attestées synchroniquement, même si a priori la négation discontinue représente le schème non marqué”

17 The decline of the averidical coordinating ne replaced by ni has been the subject of limited descriptive work (Badiou-Monferran 2005, Queffélec 1990) that has not led to explanatory consideration, probably because it contradicts the principle of the early expression of negation (Larrivée 2004: chapter 2), and does not fit into any obvious cycle of evolution. How it relates to the frailty of the preverbal negative remains to be assessed.

18 The extent of this competition is exemplified by the behaviour of ne alone in Old French. In the Anglo-Norman Correspondence Corpus, the first 100 occurrences yield, apart from 23 tokens of the homonymous coordinating conjunctions, 50 uses with some n-word (15 pas, 9 mie, 10 nul, 6 rien, 2 jamais rien, 1 mes, 1 unkes mais, 6 unkes), and 27 ne alone; of these, only 3 occur in otherwise veridical contexts, the rest being used with pouvoir (6), vouloir (3), savoir (1) and indefinite autre (2), and subordinated to a negative clause (1), a conditional si (7), a comparative (3), a correlative (1). Interestingly, these averidical contexts roughly correspond to those of modern French.

19 Pouder (2008) indicates that 1.35% of sentence negatives are expressed by ne alone in a corpus of contemporary written academic texts.

20 As pointed out by one reviewer, this discussion does not include the case of nen, "an intermediate stage between non and ne". I do not challenge that this should be considered in future work, and note that such work would need to resolve a number of difficulties. Nen presents considerable opportunity for homonymic clashes, as either a form of non, a version of néant or a contraction of ne plus partitive en (David Trotter, personal communication). The idea that nen is an intermediate stage needs careful assessment. Such an assessment would look at the chronology of forms and any differential function nen might have, as for instance the distributional difference found between English no, na and ne invalidates the view that they are mere variants (Masayuki 2005). The functions of nen are the same as that of non according to Reid (1939: 313). Whatever the case may be, the issue of nen appears orthogonal to the discussion of the relationship between marked preverbal non and pragmatic activation.

21 Interestingly, this is the period where coordinating particle ne disappears. Whether a connection is to be found remains to be determined.

22 Thanks to Franck Floricic for bringing this paper to my attention.

23 With occasional infinitives when they fulfill interactive functions such as prohibition in the following example cited by the Anglo-Norman dictionary:

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