ABSTRACT

Claude Millier : Sur quelques emplois particuliers de pas et point à l'aube du français classique

During the 1 7th century, the two negative words pas and point begin to be used exactly as they are now in Modern French. But beyond the appearance of an identical use in the two terms negation of French since that period of time, it remains in the beginning of the 17th century survivals of older values of these two words, and the semantic value of the two negative markers ne and pas, point is not the same as now: ne had still a strong negative value. On the contrary, pas and point maintained some remnants of older, non fully negative, values: that of a "semi-negation", word associated with negation like personne, jamais, allowing negative concord; and that of a negative polarity item, dissociated from the syntactic combination with ne. These values, which disappeared in standard French during that period, marginally survived for a long time in popular or dialectal French.

France Martineau & Viviane Déprez : Pas rien/Pas aucun en français classique : variation dialectale et historique

We examine the relation between ne... pas rien and ne... pas aucun in I7th and I 8th centuries French negative contexts, in Standard French but also in vernacular French. We make the hypothesis that the source of negative concord with pas + Neg Word is not linked to the deletion of ne and the weakening of pas but is rather triggered by changes which affected the value of the negative word itself. We argue that, as in forclusive contexts, the Neg word is analyzed as an polarity item in the context ne... pas rien/aucun. This polarity reading in that context disappears during Classical Standard French with the fixation of the two-terms negation (ne... N-word) and the reanalysis of rien as an negative adverb. However.the polarity item reading has been maintained in vernacular French for rien and aucun, more particularly in contexts where the polarity item is modified.

Nathalie Fournier : Approches théoriques, valeur en langue et emplois du ne dit « explétif» en français classique

This paper deals with expletive negation, ne, in 1 7th century French. By 'expletive' ne, we usually mean the use of ne, in dependant clauses (comparative clauses: il est plus grand que n'était son frère, or noun clauses: je crains qu'il ne vienne), where it can commute with zéro, but not with full negation ne., .pas. The first part of the paper examines the theoretical treatments of expletive ne, and especially its relation to negative ne (used alone or with pas); in case of a unitary treatment of the morpheme ne, two positions are possible: either deny to ne any full semantic value and consider it as a conditioned element, dependant of other contextual markers; or attribute to ne a basis semantic value, either negative (Guillaume) or "discordantielle" (Damourette et Pichon), which is responsible of different contextual values. The second and third parts, working on classical French corpora (first comparative clauses, then noun clauses), proves that expletive ne is used in much more delimitated contexts than in contemporary French, and its competition with zero is very limited. The paper examines which are the contextual factors correlated to the use of expletive ne or zero, and which semantic interpretation can be proposed when they can commute in similar contexts.

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