This chapter offers a diachronic investigation of the Occitan post-verbal negators pas and ges through the analysis of a selection of narrative texts covering the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Addressing an area that has received little attention in the literature, this chapter identifies the first occurrences of these negative markers and discusses in detail their characteristics, their development and, for ges, its decline. The data suggest that while the minimizer pas possibly started off as a marker of emphatic negation, becoming also a negator of discourse-old propositions, the generalizer ges followed the inverse path, starting as a negator of a presupposition and gradually moving to be an emphatic negator. In the case of pas, its presence in negative polar questions may hold the key to understanding the reasons behind its establishment as the generalized negative marker in modern Languedocian.

This article examines early attestations of verlan and related backward slangs in French in the nineteenth century. Its main contribution is the edition and analysis of the only known text, a letter, written with features of verlan before the twentieth century. This largely predates other attested forms of verlan. The principles underlying this early form of verlan are shown to be different from contemporary verlan, as is much other early evidence, though all forms have the syllable as their basic unit. The letter is evidence that backward slangs can originate in the education system as much as in the underworld of thieves.