An outside-in micro-parametric approach
to negative concord.’’ Discussion.
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
The micro-parametric model of the evolution of the French negative in-definites personne, rien, and aucun that is presented in Viviane De´prez’s contribution to the present volume is an elegant, and to a large extent convincing, one. One of the particular attractions of the model (at least to my mind) lies in the fact that it explicitly allows for, indeed seems to predict, a certain amount of variability among individual n-words, as a result of di¤erent diachronic sources and trajectories, as well as di¤erences in the pace of change. Nevertheless, the proposed model also raises a number of questions that will be taken up below. As it is not my intention in this contribution (nor my brief, as I understand it) to o¤er a competing account, the questions raised should be seen merely as aspects that I believe merit further reflection.
The first problem, acknowledged by De´prez herself, is that the model cannot provide a uniform explanation of the evolution of all French n-words, as the notion of movement within the DP is not immediately appli-cable to the adverbial n-wordsjamais,plus, andgue`re. The suggestion that the development of the latter may have been triggered indirectly by some similarity with the nominal n-words unfortunately does not take us very far in the absence of an account of what those similarities might be. It seems safe to say that, in terms of their potential for negative concord readings versus double negation readings, as well as the extent to which they can appear with positive meaning in non-a‰rmative polarity con-texts, French n-words behave in largely similar (even if not fully identical) ways independently of their nominalvsadverbial origins (see further below). For that reason alone, one would prefer a model capable of accounting for their development by appealing to commonalities across specific items. Even within the group of nominal n-words, it must be noted that the evolution ofnul is currently unaccounted for within the proposed model. Although nul may conceivably have evolved in a way that resembles the evolution of aucun, whether and to what extent that is so remains to be shown. Indeed, there does intuitively appear to be salient di¤erences
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between the two items. While etymologically negative, Old Frenchnuldid not have negative meaning except in the presence of preverbal ne; unlike the other nominal n-words, it does not, however, seem to have had genu-inely positive uses at any stage of French, but is found with a positive interpretation only in negative polarity contexts (Ingham 2008), suggest-ing that it must have been an NPI from the start, a status which – on De´prez’s analysis – aucunonly acquired in the Renaissance. It is doubtful whether the NPI nul could have had the adjectival status that De´prez argues for in the case of aucun, given that a quick search of the Frantext andTextes de franc¸ais anciendata bases yielded only a single – marginally possible – example of nul preceded by a determiner (where the verb pre´sumer, which has two di¤erent valency patterns, is in fact far more plausibly interpreted as indirectly transitive, making de a preposition rather than a determiner):
(1) [. . .]comme c’est asse`s pour me´rite de ne pre´sumer de nuls me´rites,[. . .].
‘as it is su‰cient for merit to not presume any merits/to not
expect too much of any merits’ (Calvin 1560) The further fact that Old Frenchnulis, in a number of instances in the data bases, followed by the indefinite pronounautreand/or by adjectives, suggests that it had the status of a determiner (when not used as a pro-noun). If I understand De´prez’s account of aucun correctly, one would therefore expect that nul should have been capable of inherently negative uses long before we reach the stage of Modern/Contemporary French.
The issue of di¤erent (types of ) n-words leads directly on to a di¤erent problem with the model, namely the assumption that negative concord in French is the result of a resumptive interpretation of a series of inherently negative n-words, such that they form a single quantifier binding several variables at the same time. This is in opposition to a sequential interpre-tation, whereby quantifiers have scope over one another, resulting in a double (or multiple) negation reading. In this, De´prez adopts the approach of May (1989). A resumptive interpretation of quantifiers requires that the items involved exhibit syntactic and semantic parallelisms, which is assumed to explain why combinations of n-words with sentential negation in ‘‘standard’’ French do not allow for negative-concord readings, but must be interpreted as double negation.
Now, while one can readily admit that nominal n-words like rien and personne, which typically fulfil argument functions in their host clauses, are intuitively dissimilar syntactically and semantically from the sentential
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negatorpas, whose role is that of an operator, it is less immediately obvi-ous that the adverbial n-words plus and gue`re, whose combination with other n-words invariably seems to give rise to concord readings, would be syntactically and semantically more similar to rien and personne than topas:
(2) Personnen’apasouvert la bouche. ‘No one did not open their mouth’, ‘Everyone opened their mouth’¼DN
(3) Personnen’aplus ouvert la bouche.
‘No one opened their mouth any more.’¼NC
(4) Personnen’ague`reouvert la bouche.
‘No one hardly opened their mouth.’¼NC
In other words, for the notion of (dis)similarity among items to be operational in determining the choice between resumptive and sequential quantification, we need a more precise account of what it means for nega-tive items to be syntactically and semantically (dis)similar in the first place, and of how degrees of (dis)similarity can be measured.
As noted above, the usefulness of the notions of resumptivevs sequen-tial quantification is predicated on the assumption that French n-words are inherently negative elements, rather than (a special type of ) NPIs bound by the preverbalne.
In the case of sentential negation, few people would probably dispute that in contemporary (spoken) French, postverbal pas is not only inher-ently negative, but also the ‘‘real’’ negator, whereas preverbalne, when it does occur, appears to be merely a kind of agreement marker, possibly used principally as a index of formality of register and/or conversational topic (Sanko¤ & Vincent 1977; Ashby 1981), possibly as a marker of negative emphasis (Fonseca-Greber 2007). Statistics of the occurrence of paswith or without preverbalne in unplanned interaction seem to amply bear this out: in both real and apparent time,neis on the decline, and in the most informal forms of conversation, it is almost completely absent, particularly among younger speakers (Sanko¤ & Vincent 1977; Ashby 1981, 2001; Coveney 1996; Hansen & Malderez 2004).
Interestingly, however, the very same empirical studies referenced above quite consistently show thatneis maintained with often significantly higher frequency in clauses containing n-words rather than pas. It is di‰cult to say how much importance should be attributed to these patterns, in as
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much as ne-retention in most cases remains below 50% in conversation; nevertheless, we might venture that they provide some evidence that speakers may be treating n-words as less fully negative thanpasin and of themselves, hence as calling for additional negative support, in the form of preverbalne.
Another set of observations regarding the distribution of n-words in contemporary European French serves to further call into question their status as inherently negative, namely the fact that a number of the French n-words are still found quite regularly with positive interpretations in a number of non-negative NPI-licensing contexts. Thus, a search of the Frantext data base comprising texts published between 2000–2007 yielded examples of the following environments:
Conditionals (only jamais): (5) Si jamaisil disait non?
‘If ever (¼what if ) he were to say no?’
Rhetorical exclamations introduced bycomme si(‘as if ’):
(6) Comme si on allait manquer derienla`-bas ! ‘As if we were going to lack for anything there!’
Direct and indirect interrogatives. These are frequently, but – as (8) shows – not invariably, rhetorical questions (paceDe´prez):
(7) Est-ilriende moins marxiste en e¤et que la de´claration des typographes de Nantes?
‘Is there, indeed, anything less Marxist than the declaration of the typesetters from Nantes?’
(8) Demande-lui si ce train se remettrajamaisen marche. ‘Ask him if this train will ever start moving again.’
Following a negated matrix clause:
(9) Je ne crois pas qu’elle ait trompe´personne. ‘I don’t think she cheated anyone.’
In infinitival clauses following a lexically negative matrix verb:
(10) Il a refuse´ de voirpersonne. ‘He refused to see anybody.’
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Following the pseudo-comparative expression [tropþAdjPþpour] (‘tooþ AdjPþto’):
(11) Il est trop content de lui pour s’apercevoir derien. ‘He’s too self-satisfied to notice anything.’
Following the temporal conjunctionavant que(‘before’):
(12) Il est parti avant quepersonnee voie. ‘He left before anyone saw him.’
Following a comparative:
(13) Il lui arrivait plus souvent qu’a`aucunautre d’eˆtre surprise par la garde. ‘She was surprised by the guard more often than anyone else.’
Following a superlative (onlyjamais):
(14) [. . .]une galette des rois chaude qui est la meilleure galette que j’aie jamaismange´e.
‘a hot Twelfth-Night cake which is the best cake I’ve ever eaten.’
Following the prepositionsansor the subordinating conjunctionsans que:
(15) Il est parti sans avertirpersonne. ‘He left without telling anybody.’ (16) [. . .]sans que celui-ci se doute derien.
‘. . . without the latter suspecting anything.’
It is not at all clear that (5)–(16) above are examples of a particularly formal (and by implication, archaic) register. While rhetorical questions with positively interpreted n-words do, as De´prez points out, feature subject-verb inversion, the word order is not principally a stylistic marker in this instance, but is due to the fact that French interrogatives with declarative SV word order simply do not admit of a rhetorical interpretation (Hansen 2001).
As De´prez’s model predicts, individual n-words vary with respect to the specific types of context in which they can occur with positive interpreta-tions in contemporary French, as shown in Table 1 below (adapted from Muller 1991: 265). It is noteworthy, however, that in terms of their evolu-tion towards inherent negativity, rien, personne, and aucun are, in fact, among the most conservative n-words in ‘‘standard’’ French, while nul,
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which, as argued above, appears structurally identical to aucun, has gone much further. The itemnulle part, which, although used in adverbial func-tions, takes the form of what looks like a DP, occupies an intermediate position. On the surface, at least, these facts go against De´prez’s predic-tion that n-words with a common internal make-up should behave homo-geneously both within and across languages.
These observations also call into question the idea thatstandardFrench and Que´be´cois French instantiate two di¤erent language types: although Que´be´cois n-words admit of positive interpretations in more contexts that their standard French equivalents, the di¤erence seems to be largely a matter of degree. The two dialects appear to di¤er most obviously in their acceptance of combinations of n-words and the sentential negator pas, which – although possible (as examples (17)–(18), from the ELICOP corpus of spoken French demonstrate) – are comparatively rare, and in cases like (17), stigmatized, in Europe. It is, however, of relevance in this context that the postverbal marker gue`re (‘hardly’), which in terms of its semantics functions like a downtoned version of the sentential negator pas, and which is largely confined to formal registers, was fully acceptable withpersonneandrienin ‘‘standard’’ French until at least the beginning of the twentieth century, and is still regularly used in combination with plus (cf. (19)–(21)):
(17) [. . .] je ne loupepas aucun fait divers ‘I don’t miss any newsworthy event.’ (18) [. . .]il disaitpasbonjour niriendu tout hein
‘He didn’t say hello or anything at all eh.’ (19) [. . .]on ne voyaitgue`re personne[. . .] (1913)
‘We hardly saw anybody.’
(20) [. . .] je n’aigue`re rienfait qui vaille.(1939) ‘I’ve hardly done anything worthwhile.’
(21) Il est vrai qu’on n’estplus gue`resupplicie´ pour cette raison.(2006) ‘It is true that one is hardly tortured for that reason anymore.’ What should be noted is that the status and interpretation of French n-words seem to have been ambiguous at least since late Middle French: thus, Martin (1966) in an in-depth study of the n-word rien, adduces a number of constructions in which Medieval and Renaissance writers regu-larly used this item with negative meaning in the absence of a licensingne.
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The final issue I wish to address in this chapter is that of grammaticali-zation. De´prez’s paper raises two questions. Firstly, she takes her point of departure in the Minimalist conception of grammaticalization as a process whereby interpretable features become uninterpretable. This prompts her to ask the question whether the evolution of the French n-words then instantiates a di¤erent type of grammaticalization, given that their nega-tive feature originally required the presence of a licensing element in order to be interpretable, and thus appears to have been strengthened rather than bleached.
While this is a very interesting observation, I tend to think its chief importance lies in flagging up a possible inadequacy in the Minimalist definition of grammaticalization. It seems to me that the evolution from NPI to inherently negative quantifier can very plausibly be argued to be a case of bleaching: Eckardt (2003: chapter 4), in her analysis of French negation, observes that prototypical NPIs are specialized for emphatic environments in so far as their use evokes scales of alternative entities/ states-of-a¤airs, while simultaneously highlighting the asserted entity/state-of-a¤airs as logically and/or rhetorically stronger than any of the alterna-tives. Thus, by choosing to deny the most striking alternative, (22)
prag-Table 1. Negative polarity uses of French N-words
N-word
Negative polarity context
jamais rien/aucun/ personne
nulle part nul plus
Sans Z Z Z Z Z
Plus que Z Z Z Z Y
Trop pour Z Z Z Y (Z)
Neg Vque Z Z Z Y Y
Neg Vinf Z Z Z Y Y
Negative item {Vinf/que} Z Z Y Y (Z)
Avant{que/de} Z Z Y (Z) Y
Peu Z Y Y Y Y
Direct (rhetorical) question Z (Z) Y Y Y
Conditional Z Y Y Y Y
Indirect interrogative Z Y Y Y Y
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matically evokes a scale of more or less contextually likely individuals that John might have talked to (e.g. a friend, a relative, a doctor, a priest, a teacher. . .). At the same time, the logical meaning of (22) is simply that ‘John talked to nobody’:
(22) John didn’t talk to a soul.
In the course of time, the emphatic, scalar properties of NPIs may gradually be lost, as they clearly have been in French to a large extent, such that only the abstract feature of negativity remains. This loss of emphatic meaning may take place at di¤erent times and at di¤erent paces for di¤erent lan-guage users, resulting in variability in the range of constructions in which n-words can occur. Given that syntax is frequently observed to lag behind semantics in grammaticalization, there is, moreover, nothing to prevent the process of semantic attrition from being e¤ectively completed, even as speakers still feel compelled to combine n-words with a preverbal ne.
The other question with respect to grammaticalization that is raised by the paper under discussion is the question of what triggered the diachronic changes that the French n-words have gone through (and more broadly, what triggers grammaticalization in general). According to the proposed model, it is very clearly syntactic changes that drive the changes in the semantics of n-words. De´prez rejects, however, the recent proposal by Zeijlstra (2008) that it is changes in the nature of sentential negation that lead to changes in n-words, arguing that the former significantly precede the latter in the history of French, and suggesting instead that the syntac-tic changes internal to the n-words themselves were driven by the loss of bare nominals elsewhere in the language.
While the latter proposal is in itself an attractive idea, there are, as far as I can tell, two problems with it: One is the fact that, as already dis-cussed, it does not generalize to n-words of adverbial origin. The other problem is that, when combined with the idea that syntactic change drives semantic change and not the other way around (as is usually assumed at least in the grammaticalization literature originating from the functional end of the linguistic spectrum), this proposal ultimately makes a puzzle of the evolution of the n-word aucun as analyzed in De´prez & Martineau (2004): if this item was already in D0 in the oldest stages of French, why would it suddenly descend to the lower adjectival position at just the time when bare nouns were being eliminated? Surely, for such a structural change to be motivated, the change in the semantics ofaucunthat De´prez argues for, from context-independent positive meaning to context-dependent negative-polarity meaning, must have preceded, rather than followed, the syntactic change.
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Without commenting specifically on Zeijlstra’s (2008) model, I would like to query De´prez’s rejection of the (to my mind, intuitively rather plau-sible) idea that changes in the sentential negation may have be instrumen-tal in triggering analogous changes in the status of n-words. While the postverbal marker pashad indubitably become fully negative by the end of the Middle Ages, that does not entail that n-words, if evolving towards inherent negativity in analogy with pas, would have to evince all the features of their new status shortly after pas did so. First of all, the fact that sentential negation is syntactically di¤erent from n-word negation may mean that it is only with some delay that speakers feel the need to bring the two forms of negation into line. Secondly, it is common in the grammaticalization literature to distinguish between reanalysis as such and its subsequent actualization (e.g. Harris & Campbell 1995: 77¤ ), i.e. the process whereby a reanalyzed item or construction comes to assume all the superficial grammatical characteristics associated with the inno-vative analysis. This process is frequently, perhaps even typically, a pro-tracted one, and it may never go to full completion in a given case.
Indeed, if De´prez’s analysis is correct and rien, personne and aucun have been reanalyzed as belonging in the strong-quantifier SDP-slot, the process of actualization must still be on-going in this case, despite the fact that it has been centuries since French lost the bare-noun construction as a productive strategy, in so far as the three items in question clearly have yet to fully adapt their distributional behavior to this new structural slot. Not only do they favorne-retention and remain capable of NPI uses, as we have seen, but the results of a Google-search suggests that they do, in fact, (contra De´prez) allow quantitativeen-cliticization, which, accord-ing to Zamparelli’s model of the DP, is a feature of the lower, weak-quantifier, PDP-slot: thus, De´prez’s starred example (35b), repeated below as (23), is attested in a number of instances, as are corresponding con-structions withrien like that in (24):1
(23) Je n’en connais personne. ‘I don’t know any of them.’
(24) Il n’en reste rien.
‘There’s nothing left of it.’
1. Indeed, the latter construction appears to be enshrined in the title of a hit song by French rock singer Eddy Mitchell,S’il n’en reste rien‘If there’s nothing left of it’.
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It is in my view important, in developing models of the evolution of negative markers, that we be careful not to idealize the database. There is ample evidence, across this and other areas of the grammar, that language users can live happily with structural and distributional variation and, indeed, ambiguities for very considerable lengths of time. In a language like French, we should probably expect such variation and ambiguities to be all the more evident due to the tension between, on the one hand, a culturally strong tradition of codification and prescriptivism with respect to the more formal, in particular written, registers, and, on the other hand, the inevitable evolution of informal, in particular spoken, registers. Actual usage suggests that French speakers are not operating with clearly separate grammars for formal versus informal registers, but are rather making contextually variable use of a (more or less extended, according to the individual) range of constructional possibilities. Our models, both of specific areas of grammar and of grammar in general, need to reflect this linguistic reality, which although it may be more complex in French than in some languages, is surely not unique to that language.
References
Sources
Elicop http://bach.arts.kuleuven.be/elicop/ (consulted April 2010) Frantext http://atilf.atilf.fr/frantext.htm (consulted April 2010) Textes de franc¸ais ancien
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/TLA/ (consulted April 2010)
Studies
Ashby, William J.
1981 The loss of the negative particlenein French: a syntactic change in progress.Language57 (3): 674–687.
Ashby, William J.
2001 Un nouveau regard sur la chute dune en franc¸ais parle´ touran-geau: s’agit-il d’un changement en cours?Journal of French Lan-guage Studies11: 1–22.
Coveney, Aidan
1996 Variability in Spoken French. A Sociolinguistic study of interroga-tion and negainterroga-tion. Exeter: Elm Bank Publications.
De´prez, Viviane & France Martineau
2004 Micro-parametric variation and negative concord. In: Julie Auger, Clancy Clements & Barbara Vance (eds.), Contemporary ap-proaches to Romance linguistics, 139–158. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 1
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Eckardt, Regine
2003 The structure of change. Meaning change under reanalysis. Berlin: Humboldt University. (Habilitationthesis. Revised version pub-lished by Oxford University Press in 2006, asMeaning change in grammaticalization.)
Fonseca-Greber, Bonnibeth Beale
2007 The emergence of emphaticne in conversational Swiss French.
Journal of French Language Studies17: 249–275. Hansen, Anita Berit & Isabelle Malderez
2004 Lenede ne´gation en re´gion parisienne: une e´tude en temps re´el.
Langue et socie´te´107: 5–30. Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard
2001 Syntax in interaction. Form and function ofyes/nointerrogatives in spoken standard French.Studies in Language25 (3): 463–520. Harris, Alice C. & Lyle Campbell
1995 Historical Syntax in a cross-linguistic perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. Ingham, Richard
2008 The spread of indefinite aucun in later AN negative clauses. Paper presented at the 1st Cycles of Grammaticalization semi-nar, Aston University, June 7 2010.
Martin, Robert
1966 Le mot rien et ses concurrents en franc¸ais (du XIVe sie`cle a`
l’e´poque contemporaine). Paris: Klincksieck. May, Robert
1989 Interpreting logical form.Linguistics and Philosophy12: 387–435. Muller, Claude
1991 La ne´gation en franc¸ais. Geneva: Droz.
Sanko¤, Gillian & Diane Vincent
1977 L’emploi productif dene dans le franc¸ais parle´ a` Montre´al. Le franc¸ais moderne45: 243–256.
Zeijlstra, Hedde
2008 Negative concord in syntactic agreement. MS, University of Amsterdam.
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