Introduction to the special issue: ‘Negation and Clitics in French: Interaction and Variation’

Abstract

This introduction presents very briefly some of the main issues currently discussed around negation particles and clitics in contemporary French and taken up by the six contributions it assembles, namely language change (grammaticalisation of clitics into agreement markers, completion of the Jespersen Cycle) vs. stable variation, and external (sociolinguistic) or internal (phonotactic, prosodic, or syntactic) factors triggering variation in both cases; the hypothesis of a potential diglossia in French opposing two grammars with considerable syntactic differences. Five out of six contributions focus on modern standard and non-standard varieties of French, with a formal theoretical background, while one shows a more philological-descriptive approach and is dedicated to Old French manuscripts.