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April 7th – The History of Negation in French, Columbia University

Tagged: Corpus, French, Language, Linguistics, Theater

  • This topic has 2 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 5 years, 11 months ago by Angus Grieve-Smith.
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    • March 28, 2017 at 7:18 pm #2664
      Angus Grieve-Smith
      Participant

      THE HISTORY OF NEGATION IN FRENCH
      Dressler Lecture Series
      Friday, April 7
      4 PM
      S.W. Mudd Building, Room 327
      500 West 120th Street (Corner of Amsterdam Avenue)
      Subway: 116th Street (#1 train)

      Angus Grieve Smith
      Columbia University Information technology

      The basic outlines of the history of negation in French are well-known: that in Old French sentences were negated with ne alone; that ne began to be supplemented with pas, which also means “step”; that recently people have been using pas by itself to negate sentences. This process is the best-known example of Jespersen’s Cycle, which has also produced English not, German nicht and Italian mica.

      Looking more closely at this process through a corpus of theatrical texts, we find some intriguing details. The use of ne alone or ne … pas conveyed a semantic and pragmatic distinction in Old French, which appears to have been lost around the sixteenth century. From the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, the proportion of sentence negations using ne … pas rises in a classic S-curve shape. The shift from ne alone to ne … pas did not proceed at random, but in a definite pattern defined by the entrenchment of high-frequency patterns.

      Altogether, these events provide support for usage-based theories of language change. In particular, these theories model how language users forget which construction to use and fall back on the one that they remember as being more general. Patterns that are used more frequently are then more resistant to this kind of change.

    • March 30, 2017 at 9:53 pm #2668
      Angus Grieve-Smith
      Participant

      John McWhorter writes:

      Due to unforeseen circumstances, we must host Angus Grieve-Smith a week later than previously planned. Please mark your calendars for April FOURTEENTH for this interesting talk.

    • April 7, 2017 at 9:49 am #2683
      Angus Grieve-Smith
      Participant

      Again, the talk is not today, but next Friday, April 14. I hope to see you all there!

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