Please attend the fifth of our six Dressler colloquia of the school year.
Have you ever wondered why there are two negator morphemes in French (ne
… pas), or why the situation was once the same in English (its use of NOT
started as a “ne … not” construction)? We will learn how the French
situation arose, in more detail than textbooks usually present, based on
Angus Grieve-Smith’s fascinating research. In other words:
*THE HISTORY OF NEGATION IN FRENCH*
Friday, April FOURTEENTH
4 PM
Mudd 327 *(note: NOT Hamilton 703)*
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.
See you there!
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