Forms of sentence negation in a 14th-century French text: a cognitive/functional analysis

Abstract

As is well-known, older stages of French were characterized, among other things, by variability in the expression of sentence negation. Thus, while a plain preverbal ne was the unmarked form of negation, it was frequently reinforced by one of a variety of (originally nominal) elements, most prominently pas, mie, and point, the first of which was eventually grammaticalized as the canonical form of sentence negation in Classical and Modern French. The aim of this paper is to strengthen the synchronic hypothesis, previously formulated in Hansen (fc) and Hansen & Visconti (fc) that the observed variation was structured by discourse-functional constraints relating to the cognitive status of the negated proposition or its underlying positive variant, such that reinforced negators in older stages of French were constrained to appear in “discourse-old” propositions. As additional empirical support for this hypothesis, I present a form/function analysis of all tokens of sentence negation in a single 14th century text, Le Miracle de l’enfant donné au Diable.