The Loss of the Negative Particle ne in French: A Syntactic Change in Progress

A Corpus Analysis of Intra- and Extralinguistic Factors triggeringne-Deletion in Phonic French

“…Concerning the intra-linguistic factors, the different studies mentioned in diagram 1 suggest the statistic tendencies shown in Table 2 Probabilistic influences of the extralinguistic factors on ne-realization Generally, in a synchronic perspective, the absence of ne is seen as a sociolinguistic indicator for lower social class and young speakers (cf. Ashby, 1976Ashby, , 1981Ashby, , 2001Coveney, 2 2002;Hansen/Malderez, 2004) and also as a marker of informal speech style (cf. Ashby, 1976Ashby, , 1981Armstrong, 2002;Coveney, 2 2002) (cf.…”

“…Ashby, 1976Ashby, , 1981Ashby, , 2001Coveney, 2 2002;Hansen/Malderez, 2004) and also as a marker of informal speech style (cf. Ashby, 1976Ashby, , 1981Armstrong, 2002;Coveney, 2 2002) (cf. section 5.2).…”

“…Ashby (1981) simply divides his interviews into a first and a second half, comparing the ne-realization rates of the two parts, while he assumes the first to be formal and the latter to be informal because the informants might be more relaxed the longer they talk to him. Additionally, he reports that three speakers "dropped ne roughly twice as often", when he was able to record them out of their office and in company of friends and family "after food and wine were amply consumed" (cf.…”

Modeling the Semantic and Pragmatic Evolution ofne … pasin French

“…It has been investigated in small corpus studies in Old French (e.g. Yvon 1959) and early Modern French (Martineau and Mougeon 2003), and sociolinguistic studies have examined recent changes in the language (Ashby 1981, Ashby 2001. The following examples are taken from a corpus of French theatrical texts that I have compiled for this project, with the negative particles highlighted in bold: I have been investigating the syntactic aspects of the change : when did people start using ne … pas, and why ?…”

Synchronic variation in the expression of French negation: A Distributed Morphology approach

“…However, in contrast to most sociolinguistic studies dedicated to this phenomenon (cf. Ashby, 1976Ashby, , 1981Ashby, , 2001Armstrong and Smith, 2002;Coveney, 2002) we will focus on the linguistic factors influencing ne-variation, since their importance is empirically evident but not yet fully exploited on a theoretical level. One leading assumption with respect to ne-variation in literature is that the particle ne is most frequently retained in combination with a proper name or a full DP and is commonly omitted when combined with clitic subjects.…”