French Negation In Diachrony

Download or read book French Negation in Diachrony written by Thomas Carlton and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French language has a negation pattern unlike most other Romance languages, using both a pre-verbal and post-verbal negation marker. In addition, the post-verbal marker most commonly used in Modern French, pas, was not the only one used over the centuries, nor did the word pas originally have any negative meaning. This dissertation is an investigation of the process of grammaticalization by which pas became part of the standard negation structure using three sources of data. First, a diachronic analysis is done of various historical French dictionaries to see how the perception of different negation structures changed over time. This allows us to see how pas developed along the continuum of grammaticalization and to identify the timeframes in which other negation structures were considered archaic. The second method done is an analysis of corpus data of Medieval French. This gives insight into how long additional negations continued to be used in various genres, and to see specifically how much overlap there was between the use of pas compared to the competing structures. The third source of data is an Ngram Viewer used to track negation frequencies over time. Through the dictionary analysis, corpus data, and Ngram graphs, I confirm the general timeframe found in most current literature, but also identify a trend with the post-verbal mie and its use as a literary device to reflect archaism.