John Benjamins Publishing Company

John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from The Diachrony of Negation. Edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti. © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

The grammaticalization of negative indefinites The case of the temporal/aspectual n-words plus and mais in Medieval French Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen The University of Manchester

This chapter traces the diachronic evolution in Medieval French of two temporal/ aspectual n-words of adverbial origin, the markers mais (< Lat. MAGIS ‘more, to a greater degree’) and plus (< Lat. PLUS ‘more’), equivalent to English no more/no longer, anymore/any longer, with a view to addressing two theoretical issues: (i) whether the evolution of indefinites is unidirectional, as claimed by Haspelmath (1997), or rather subject to a “random diachronic walk”, as suggested by Jäger (2010); (ii) whether the evolution of the French n-words can be described in terms of a general cyclical development parallel to that of the standard clause negator (commonly known as Jespersen’s Cycle). It is argued that, like those reported in Hansen (2012), the results of this study support the random walk hypothesis, and weakens the case for a quantifier cycle in French. Moreover, the results of the two studies suggest that functional categories, or paradigms, are pragmatic, rather than linguistic, entities.

1. Introduction A current issue in research on the evolution of clause negation in French concerns the existence of a “quantifier cycle”, paralleling the basic Jespersen Cycle, in that language.1 If French has been through a quantifier cycle, that would imply that the set of so-called n-words, i.e. the indefinite quantifiers used in negative clauses, in

. The notion of “cycles” is used loosely in this paper, following the terminology used in Willis et al. (2013: 27f).. As will become clear below, even standard clause negation in French has not completed an actual diachronic cycle, in as much as the postverbal negative marker has so far failed to move to a preverbal position (except in infinitival clauses). The notion of a “quantifier cycle” is adapted from Ladusaw’s (1993) term “argument cycle”, and should not be taken to imply an expectation that the contemporary French n-words will someday become polarity-neutral again.

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

Modern French developed as a group, along similar lines, and for similar reasons, possibly as a result of prior developments in the expression of standard clause negation, as proposed by Zeijlstra (2008). Déprez and Martineau’s (2004) study of the n-words rien (‘nothing/anything’), personne (‘nobody/anybody’), and aucun (‘no(ne)/any’), all of which are of nominal origin and prototypically function as valency elements in negated clauses, convincingly suggests, however, that the diachronic evolution of these items was strongly influenced by developments elsewhere in the nominal system. The account offered by Déprez & Martineau (2004) is therefore, as pointed out by Hansen (2011: 273), inherently unable to account for n-words of non-nominal origin. In addition, Hansen (2012) provides evidence that the temporal adverbial n-word jamais (‘(n)ever’) developed in a way that runs counter to what one would expect if a general quantifier cycle were operative in French. Further in-depth studies of individual n-words thus appear to be called for. More generally, it has been proposed by Haspelmath (1997: 230ff) that the evolution of indefinite quantifiers is unidirectional, going from positive through affective to negative uses. In counterdistinction to this, Jäger (2010) proposes a nonunidirectional “random walk” model of the diachronic development of indefinites. While aspects of Jäger’s model are problematic (cf. Willis 2011; van der Auwera & Van Alsenoy 2011), Hansen’s (2012) study of jamais supports the idea of at least partial non-unidirectionality, and again calls for further studies of individual n-words. The present study traces the diachronic evolution in Medieval French of two temporal/aspectual n-words of adverbial origin, the markers mais (< Lat. MAGIS ‘more, to a greater degree’) and plus (< Lat. PLUS ‘more’).2 Throughout the Medieval period, mais and plus were in competition in contexts of quantifier negation, where they were used in combination with preverbal ne to convey a temporal / aspectual meaning equivalent to English no more/no longer, anymore/any longer, as in (1)-(2):

(1) “Sire, je ne puis plus chi demorer,…” (Merlin, p. 145, c. 1230–35 – from BFM) ‘Sire, I can no longer stay here…/I can’t stay here any longer,…’

(2) Et Gavains, qui avoit ja si avanchié son caup qu’il ne le puet mais retenir. (Merlin, p. 166, c. 1230–35 – from BFM) ‘And Gawain, who had already gone so far in casting his blow that he can no longer hold it back/… that he cannot hold it back any longer.’

. As Medieval French had no standard orthography, the exact forms reproduced in the examples vary. This is particularly the case with mais.


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

In Modern French, only (ne…)plus remains, the relevant sense of mais having disappeared in the course of the 16th c.3 A tentative explanation of why this happened will be proposed. It will be argued that the evolution of mais and plus, like that of jamais, provides evidence against the notion that developments in the quantifier domain are unidirectional, and thus further weakens the idea of a general quantifier cycle in French. Moreover, it will be argued that the evolution and contemporary status of plus support Hansen’s (2008, 2012) view of functional categories, or functional paradigms,4 as pragmatic rather than linguistic entities.

2. The evolution of French negation and the problem of n-words Negation in French is usually cited as a salient example of Jespersen’s Cycle ( Jespersen 1917: 4), whereby, across a number of (prominently European) languages, the marking of standard clause negation (as defined by Payne 1985: 198) is initially preverbal, but becomes bipartite, then postverbal, and finally preverbal again. Table 1 illustrates actual and potential future stages of evolution in French. Standard European French is currently at stage 4, and there is widespread agreement in the literature that the postverbal marker pas is the principal marker of negation in Modern French, whereas the preverbal clitic ne (if present) has seen its status reduced to that of a mere agreement marker (cf. Rowlett 1998: Chapter 1).

. This study adheres to the following commonly accepted periodization of the history of the French language: Old French: 9th-13th century Middle French: 14th-16th century Classical French: 17th-18th century Modern French: 19th-21st century The term “Medieval French” is a cover term for Old and Middle French. I also occasionally refer to the most recent subperiod of Modern French, viz. late 20th-21st century French, as “contemporary French”. . No claims will be made in this paper about the status of morphological paradigms.


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

Table 1. The evolution of French clause negation (sample sentence: ‘I do not say…’)5 Stage 0. [Classical Latin]

non dico

The negator is preverbal

Stage 1. [Proto-French]

je ne dis

The preverbal negator is phonetically reduced

Stage 2. [Old/Middle French]

je ne dis (pas/mie/point)

The preverbal negator is optionally complemented by a postverbal element

Stage 3. [Classical French]

je ne dis pas

The postverbal element grammaticalizes as part of a discontinuous negator embracing the verb

Stage 4. [Modern/ Contemporary French]

je (ne) dis pas

The original preverbal negator becomes optional

Stage 5. [Future French?]

je dis pas

The negator is postverbal

Stage 6. [Louisiana French Creole]5

mo pa di

The previously postverbal negator migrates to preverbal position

In the Medieval period, which is of primary interest to this study, Stage 2, i.e. the mirror image of the present-day situation, obtained: the preverbal clitic was the principal clause negator, which could be optionally reinforced by various postverbal items. Some such items, principally pas (< Latin PASSU(M) ‘step’), mie (< Latin MICA(M) ‘crumb’), and point (< Latin PUNCTU(M) ‘point’), were used to reinforce the most basic form of clausal negation (although, as shown by Hansen 2009, initially only in pragmatically marked contexts), (3)-(4) being thus synonymous at the truth-conditional level. (3) Je nel vos dirai. (4) Je nel vos dirai pas/mie/point. ‘I won’t tell you’, lit. ‘I will not say it to you.’

In addition to postverbal markers of standard clause negation, however, other items were used to focus negation on a particular clause constituent by quantifying that constituent as zero, thereby semantically implying negation of the

. Clearly, we cannot assume that Creoles necessarily represent future stages of the superstrate language. Louisiana French Creole is thus adduced principally to illustrate the full Jespersen Cycle. That said, French negated infinitives have in fact already completed the cycle, as shown in (i)(cf. Martineau 1994): (i) Il m’a dit de (ne) pas y aller. ‘He told me not to go there.’


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

clause in its entirety, as illustrated in (5). Just as Medieval speakers had a choice of postverbal markers of standard clause negation at their disposal, so they had a variety of ways of expressing zero quantification of particular types of constituents in negative clauses. Thus, as seen in (5), the nouns rien and chose (both ‘thing’) could both be used with an essentially pronominal function, to represent inanimate referents:6

(5) Je ne voy rien qui ne m’anuye, Et ne sçay chose qui me plaise (Ch. D.Orl., 457, 2, early 15th c. – from Martin 1966: 234) ‘I see nothing that doesn’t upset me and I know of nothing that pleases me’, Lit.: ‘I don’t see thing that doesn’t upset me, And I don’t know thing that pleases me’

Similarly, in Medieval French, mais and plus could be used with adverbial function, to express quantification of a temporal/aspectual nature. However, just as the choice of postverbal markers of standard clause negation was gradually reduced, leaving pas as the only register-neutral option in contemporary French,7 so the available quantifiers were gradually reduced, essentially leaving only one marker for each relevant type of constituent.8 Thus, in Modern Standard French, temporal/aspectual plus forms part of a closed set of so-called n-words (Laka Muzarga 1990: 107), i.e. items that are used for purposes of quantification in both negative and certain weak negative-polarity (or ‘affective)’ contexts. Apart from plus, the French n-word paradigm includes the items personne (‘nobody/anybody’, < Latin PERSONA ‘mask, character’), rien (‘nothing/anything’, < Latin REM ‘thing’), aucun (‘no(ne)/any’, < Latin ALIQUIS UNUS ‘some one’), nulle part (‘nowhere/ anywhere’, < Latin NULLA PARTE ‘in no place’), and jamais (‘(n)ever’, < Latin

. According to Martin (1966: 229), chose was principally used in contexts where it was followed by a relative clause, as in (5). . In principle, point remains possible alternative, but it is both archaic and marked for a high degree of formality. . In principle, the two quantifiers aucun and nul (< Latin NULLUS ‘no(ne)’) can still both be used as animacy-neutral pronouns and determiners. Likewise, contemporary colloquial French possesses a few expressions that function as alternatives to the ones listed in the main text, the most prominent one being the expression que dalle (‘nothing’), as in (i). However, like point, nul is confined to formal registers in contemporary French, while, conversely, que dalle is strongly marked for informality. These expressions are therefore left out of consideration here. (i) Je pige que dalle, moi. ‘I understand nothing.’


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

IAM MAGIS ‘from now on more’). The first three function pronominally, as valency elements, or alternatively, in the case of aucun, as a determiner, while the last two have adverbial functions, respectively marking place and time. The semantic status of the Modern French n-words is, however, problematic for a number of reasons: As mentioned above, they typically occur in negative contexts with seemingly inherent negative meaning. In this, they resemble negative indefinites like those of the Standard English no-series. The interpretation of the French n-words as inherently negative is supported by two distributional facts: i. The preverbal negative clitic ne may be – and very frequently is – absent in colloquial registers, in which case the n-words alone express negation, cf. (6): (6) Il (n’)a rien dit. ‘He said nothing/didn’t say anything’

ii. The n-words categorically occur without ne in negative sentence fragments, and thus express negation on their own in such contexts, cf. (7): (7) A. Qui est venu ? B. (*Ne) Personne. ‘A. Who came? B. Nobody.’

Unlike Standard English, however, French is a negative concord (NC) language (cf. De Swart 2010: 19ff), so if two or more n-words co-occur within a negated clause, that clause will by default be interpreted as containing only a single negation at the semantic level, as illustrated in (8). While double negation (DN) interpretations are possible in certain circumstances (typically if emphatic stress is put on the second n-word as in (9)), they remain marginal: (8) Personne (n’)a rien dit. ‘Nobody said anything.’ (NC) (9) Personne (n’)a RIEN dit. ‘Nobody said nothing.’ = ‘Everybody said something.’ (DN)

Yet negative concord in Modern Standard French9 does not extend to combinations of n-words with the standard clause negator pas. Such combinations invariably result in DN interpretations, cf. (10), making French a “negative-spread” language, rather than a strict-NC language (cf. de Swart 2010: 46):

. This is not true of all dialects. Quebecois, for instance, allows an NC interpretation of (10).


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

(10) Ne le dis pas à personne ! ‘Don’t tell nobody!’ = ‘Tell somebody!’

Finally, the French n-words also occur, with non-negative meaning, in so-called affective, or weak negative-polarity, contexts (cf. Klima 1964: 313) such as interrogatives, conditionals, comparatives etc. cf. (11). (11) Elle travaille mieux qu’aucun autre étudiant. ‘She works better than any other student.’

For the reasons above, these items cannot be clearly identified as either inherently negative quantifiers or negative-polarity items (NPIs). Further complicating the picture, the individual n-words form a cline in terms of their potential to appear in weak negative-polarity contexts. As Table 2 shows, jamais is acceptable in the widest range of such contexts, while plus is clearly acceptable in only one (and marginally so in two others). Thus, plus is common after the preposition sans (‘without’), as in (12). The status of sans as a strong vs weak negative polarity environment will be discussed further in Section 6 below: (12) Il est parti sans plus attendre. ‘He left without waiting any longer.’

In addition, Modern French temporal-aspectual plus is occasionally found in contexts such as (13)-(14), where it normally occurs only in combination with at least one other n-word, however (cf. Muller 1991: 265). This suggests that such examples are, in fact, instances of parasitic licensing, where the other n-word provides the negative feature required for plus to appear (cf. Den Dikken 2002; Hoeksema 2007):10 (13) Ce cours était trop ennuyeux pour que personne ait plus envie d’y assister. ‘That course was too boring for anyone to want to participate anymore/ again.’ (14) Il refusait de plus recevoir personne. ‘He refused to see anyone anymore/again.’

. Interestingly, Hoeksema (2007) shows that meer, the closest Dutch equivalent of plus, is similarly quite restricted in its distribution (as are English anymore and German mehr, according to the data presented in Hoeksema 2013), but that it may occasionally be parasitically licensed in other environments. Why this should be so remains to be elucidated.


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

Table 2. Negative polarity uses of French n-words (adapted from Muller 1991: 265)11 N-word Negative polarity context

jamais

rien/aucun/ personne

nulle part

plus

Following sans (‘without’)

√

√

√

√

Comparative of inequality

√

√

√

×

Following trop… pour (‘too (much) to/for’)

√

√

√

(√)

Complement clause or non-finite clause following negated verb

√

√

√

×

Complement clause or non-finite clause following a semantically negative item

√

√

×

(√)

Complement clause or non-finite clause following avant {que/de} (‘before’)

√

√

×

×

Following peu (‘little’)

√

×

×

×

Direct (rhetorical) question

√

(√)

×

×

Conditional

√

×

×

×

Indirect interrogative11

√

×

×

×

Given that, like the standard clause negator pas, all the n-words listed above, with the exception of nulle part, are derived from items that originally had polarity-neutral meanings, it is tempting to posit the existence of a quantifier cycle, as in Table 3, parallel to the basic Jespersen Cycle, with Modern/Contemporary French at Stage 3 (cf. Ladusaw 1993).12 Such a cycle would be compatible with

. An anomymous referee asks if this takes into account the nature of the matrix verb, Guerzoni & Sharvit (2007) having shown that NPI licensing in English indirect interrogatives is variable, such that interrogatives embedded under predicates like wonder accept NPIs more easily that those governed by predicates like know, cf. (i)-(ii)(where % indicates cross-speaker variability): (i) Claire wonders which students have any books on Negative Polarity. (ii) %Claire knows which students have any books on Negative Polarity. It is not clear from Muller’s (1991) discussion whether he has explicitly considered this issue. However, while it seems intuitively that, indeed, not any indirect interrogative will accept n-words with a non-negative interpretation in French, the question appears to be relevant only for jamais, none of the other n-words (incl. plus) being admissible at all. For that reason, I leave the matter out of consideration in the remainder of this paper. . Note that Ladusaw (1993) does not speak of a “quantifier cycle” as such, but of an “argument cycle”. Strictly speaking, he is thus making no claims about the diachronic evolution of indefinites with non-argument functions, such as plus, jamais, and (in most of its uses) nulle


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

Haspelmath’s (1997: 230ff) claim that negative indefinites are endpoints of grammaticalization, and that they evolve out of non-negative indefinites, whereas the inverse direction of evolution is excluded as being counter to unidirectionality. Table 3. A possible quantifier cycle in French Stage 1.

Je ne dis (rien) ‘I do not say (a thing)’

A positive NP optionally accompanies preverbal ne to make the scope of the negation explicit

Stage 2.

Je ne dis rien ‘I don’t say anything’

ne + Negative Polarity Item

Stage 3.

Je (ne) dis rien ‘I don’t say anything/I say nothing’

N-word optionally accompanied by preverbal ne

(Stage 4. [Future French?]

Je dis rien ‘I say nothing’

Negative quantifier)

Indeed, the cycle in Table 3 appears to correctly represent the evolution of the nominal n-words, aucun, rien and personne. In Medieval French, rien and personne are amply attested both as full nouns and as indefinites in both weak and strong negative-polarity contexts, and examples like (15) show that, like NPIs, they could be combined with the standard clause negator up until the period of Classical French: (15) …et tous vos beaux dictons ne servent pas de rien. (Molière, L’école des femmes. I.vi, 1672) ‘…and all your pretty sayings don’t serve any purpose’

Nor is there any doubt that these indefinites have undergone grammaticalization, in as much as their gender has changed from the more marked feminine to the unmarked masculine, and they have undergone decategorialization, losing their capacity to accept both determination and direct modification (cf. Déprez 2011: 251ff). With respect to aucun, Déprez & Martineau (2004) show that, as a pronoun, this item was predominantly used in polarity-neutral and weak negative-polarity contexts in Renaissance French, with negative contexts constituting a clear minority. The proportions were, however, gradually reversed, such that aucun is now favored in strong negative contexts. Just as the noun rien

part. Ladusaw does, however, argue that his proposed cycle is intimately bound up with the development of negative concord. If that is the case, it is unclear why the adverbial n-words should be excluded from the proposed cycle, given that they participate in NC on an equal footing with the argument terms rien, personne, and aucun.


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

eventually disappeared, positive uses of aucun are completely absent from the contemporary language, apart from the frozen (and stylistically marked) expression d’aucuns (‘some’). The evolution of the three indefinites rien, personne, and aucun thus supports the hypothesis of positive > negative unidirectionality in the evolution of quantifiers. However, as shown in Hansen (2012), the adverbial n-word jamais presents a problem for the hypothesized quantifier cycle and for Haspelmath’s hypothesis about the grammaticalization of indefinites. The data adduced in that paper strongly suggest that jamais was lexicalized as a negative marker at an early stage, and only subsequently developed its uses in weak negativepolarity contexts. Although its component morpheme ja was polarity-neutral (Hansen 2014), no attestations of jamais in polarity-neutral contexts were found in Hansen’s (2012) data, apart from sporadic instances of the frozen expression à/pour jamais (‘forever’). In combination with the observations regarding contemporary NPI uses of the French n-words, summarized in Table 2 above, this raises the question of the unity of the n-word paradigm in that language, and makes it relevant to take a closer look at the evolution of mais and plus in negative-polarity contexts. Both these markers are adverbial in nature just like jamais, and it is at least conceivable that there might be a divide between nominal n-words on the one hand and adverbial n-words on the other. At the same time, however, contemporary plus behaves quite differently from jamais in affective contexts, a fact which may or may not be attributable to different developmental paths.

3. The meaning of temporal/aspectual mais and plus in Medieval French As noted above, mais and plus as n-words both originate in polarity-neutral Latin adverbs expressing comparative degree and/or quantity, e.g. (16)-(17). Latin MAGIS is related to the adjective MAGNUS (‘great’), and basically expressed degree, while PLUS is the comparative of MULTUS (‘much’), and thus tended to express quantity in a more concrete sense. That said, these two kinds of meaning overlap in many contexts. Neither of the Latin adverbs appears to have been used in negative contexts with a temporal/aspectual meaning similar to that of their French descendants. (16) Non magis Alexandri saevitiam quam Bessi parricidium ferre potuisse. (Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magnus 7, 6, 15) ‘That they had not been able to bear Alexander’s savagery any more (i.e. ‘to any greater degree’) than the Bessian’s parricide.’


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

(17) Quamquam nostri casus plus honoris habuerunt quam laboris… (Cicero, De Republica, 1,7) ‘Although our cases involved more (of) honor than (of) labor’

The temporal/aspectual sense of mais and plus thus represents a later development. The Latin uses are, however, preserved in the two Medieval French adverbs, and in the contemporary language, plus remains prominently used as an adverb of both degree and quantification, as shown in (18)–(19).13 (18) Ce vin est plus cher que l’autre. ‘This wine is more expensive than the other one.’ (19) On reçoit plus de pluie à Manchester qu’à Londres.14 ‘We get more rain in Manchester than in London.’

Although highly unlikely to actually be uttered for reasons of euphony (as well as – in the case of (21) – extralinguistic reasons), (20)–(21) would thus in principle be grammatically correct sentences in Modern French: (20) Ce vin n’est plus plus cher que l’autre. ‘This wine is no longer more expensive than the other one.’ (21) On ne reçoit plus plus de pluie à Manchester qu’à Londres. ‘We no longer get more rain in Manchester than in London.’

According to several scholars, mais was the frontrunner in the development towards the temporal/aspectual meaning, and plus still had only (or at least essentially) quantitative meaning in Old French, not acquiring its temporal sense until the Middle French period (Foulet 1946, 1965: 248ff, Offord 1976: 363ff, Marchello-Nizia 1997: 311f). As Table 6 below will show, however, my data do not bear that out. Temporal/aspectual mais and plus belong to the class of phasal adverbs, which in Modern French additionally includes such items as déjà (‘already’), encore (‘yet’, ‘still’), toujours (‘still’, ‘always’), and enfin (‘finally’) (cf. Hansen 2008). Phasal adverbs impose particular perspectives on the temporal evolution of . While the morpheme mais still exists in Modern French, it has lost all the uses mentioned above, and functions only as an adversative connective corresponding to English but, a use that is attested since Old French, and which, as suggested by Ducrot and Vogt (1979: 318) can be plausibly derived from Latin structures like that in (i): (i)

Id, Manli, non est turpe, magis miserum est (Catullus, 68, 30) ‘That, Manlius, is not shameful, it’s more sad.’ >> ‘That’s not shameful, but sad.’

. Plus would tend to be pronounced with a final /s/, as /plys/ in this use, to distinguish it from the n-word, which is always pronounced /ply/.


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

states-of-affairs, by indicating, either prospectively or retrospectively, whether or not a transition has taken place or is expected to take place between two phases – a positive and negative one – of one and the same state-of-affairs. Cross-linguistically, phasal adverbs divide into four classes: inchoatives (‘already’, ‘finally’), continuatives (‘still’), discontinuatives (‘no longer’), and continuative negatives (‘still not’) (van der Auwera 1998). In negative contexts, which constitute by far their most common environment, phasal ne…mais/plus represent the external negation of the continuative phasal adverbs encore and toujours, and thus function as discontinuative markers. As such, they presuppose that the state-of-affairs referred to by the clause was in a positive stage at some point prior to topic time,15 while asserting that, at topic time, a transition into a negative stage has occurred. In other words, (22) below, with the verb in the present indicative, presupposes that there was a time in the past where Pierre was present at the speaker’s current location, but asserts that at the time of utterance, Pierre is not present at that location. (22) Pierre n’est plus là. ‘Pierre is no longer here.’

In weak negative polarity contexts, Medieval French mais and plus have continuative meaning, corresponding to encore/toujours in Modern French. Thus, as in their negative uses, they presuppose the validity of the state-of-affairs at some point in time prior to topic time, and in addition they suggest the possibility of its continued or renewed validity at topic time or beyond, without however, asserting it (cf. (23)-(24)): (23) Peu voy cité, peu voi chastel Ou il ait mes ancïen prince. (G. de Coinci 4, p. 26, v. 653, c. 1218–27 – from BFM) ‘I see few towns, I see few castles where there is still an old prince/where there is an old prince anymore.’ (24) Se vos plus vos entremetez je le lairé et me prendrai a vos. (Graal, p. 191, c. 1220 – from BFM) ‘If you involve yourself in this again/anymore I’ll leave him and attack you.’

Both these meanings can be related to the original quantifying senses of the markers if time is conceived metaphorically as a scalar phenomenon, such that temporal continuity of a state of affairs consists in the addition of points or intervals to an existing scale. Conversely, a state-of-affairs is discontinued when

. For the notion of “topic time”, cf. Klein 1992.


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

t emporal points/intervals cease to be added to the scale, in other words when the end of the scale has been reached. Both mais and plus are also sporadically found in positive contexts. With plus, this is only the case in my 16th-century data, while positive temporal mais is attested in the corpus from the 12th to the 14th century. Neither of the two markers has phasal continuative meaning in positive contexts. While clearly referring to temporal duration, the plus in (25) below is essentially comparative in meaning, and would need to be followed by an adverb like longtemps (‘a long time’) to be acceptable in this kind of context in Modern French. Positive mais has inchoative meaning similar to that of Modern French désormais (‘henceforth’), as seen in (26): (25) Ma dame, je viens de sainct François où j’ay sejourné (peut estre) plus que mon devoir ne requeroit ; (Pierre Boisteau, Histoires tragiques, 116, 1559 – from DMF) ‘My lady, I come from Saint Francis where I stayed (perhaps) longer than my duty required;’ (26) “Vo pooirs, fait ele, et li nostres Doit mais estre tout une cose.” (Escoufle, p. 272, v. 8377, c. 1200–02 – from BFM) ‘Your power, says she, and ours must henceforth be one and the same.”

4. D ata The present study is based principally on attestations of (potentially) temporal/ aspectual mais and plus in two large electronic data bases, the Base de français médiéval (BFM) and the Dictionnaire du moyen français (DMF). The former contains a total of 30 Old and Middle French texts (1,483,339 words) spanning the period 842–1467.16 Occurrences of mais and plus in the BFM have been quantified by century, resulting in a division of the BFM into five subcorpora. The distribution of texts and number of words in the texts per century is represented in Table 2 below. The considerably larger DMF contains 242 Middle and Renaissance French texts. For the purposes of this study, I have made use of a total of only 15 of the DMF texts, namely those that represent 16th c. French, and which together contain 803,847 words. Because mais disappears in the course of the 16th c., that c entury

. Both the BFM and the DMF are evolving data bases. The information provided here is valid for the time when the data for this study was downloaded, in January 2012.


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

has been subdivided into two periods of 50 years each, with the distribution of texts and number of words likewise represented in Table 4 below. In addition, Table 4 gives an overview of the total number of tokens of (potentially) temporal uses of mais and plus, and of the overall occurrence of the two items out of the total number of words in the sub-corpora. A few important caveats must be noted with respect to the BFM data in particular: While all or most of the 16th c. DMF corpus can be assumed to be based on printed texts, the data from BFM originate in critical editions of originally handwritten manuscripts. Thus, the possibility that, where those critical editions are based on more than one manuscript, there may be variation in the use of mais and plus among those manuscripts cannot be excluded. The original Medieval manuscripts have not been consulted for the purposes of this study. Furthermore, the BFM data represent a variety of Northern French (i.e. langue d’oïl) dialects, incl. Anglo-Norman. Although from the 12th c. onwards, all but three of the texts contain tokens of both mais and plus with (potentially) temporal meaning, dialectal preferences for one or the other likewise cannot be excluded, but have not been systematically investigated. There is, however, no indication of such preferences to be found in a number of existing grammars of Medieval French (Foulet 1965; Togeby 1974; Moignet 1976; Buridant 2000). Table 4. Overview of the principal data used in this study Period No. of texts No. of words

11th c. 12th c. 13th c. 14th c. 15th c. 1501–1550 1551–1600 3

4

11

5

6

4

483,076

320,771

Tokens of temporal mais

5

2

351

14

23

3

0

Tokens of temporal plus

0

19

247

67

118

194

104

Overall occurrence of temporal mais per 1,000 words Overall occurrence of temporal plus per 1,000 words

5,171 32,981 756,230 331,724 357,233

11

.00096 .00006 .00046 .000042 .000064 .0000062 0

.00057 .00032

.0002

.00033

.0004

0 .00032

In the BFM, temporal/aspectual uses amount to 9.27% of the total number of tokens of the forms mais/mes. The remaining 90.73%, which will not be discussed further in this study, represent a variety of other uses of these forms, principally as an adversative conjunctions, cf. (27), but also, in the case of mes, as 1st person sg. possessive articles, cf. (28): © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

(27) Mais un de nus valt de ces cent (Wace, Brut, p. 647, v. 12428, 1155 – from BFM) ‘But one of us is worth one hundred of those.’ (28) Mes sires Gauvains fu navrez ou costé senestre, (Graal, p. 152, c. 1220 – from BFM) ‘My Lord Gawain was wounded on the left side,’

In other words, the use of Latin MAGIS as a non-temporal degree adverb is not attested at all as a possible use of mais in my corpus. In the DMF data, temporal/ aspectual mais is only found in the first half of the 16th c., and only a total of 3 tokens, or 0.2% of the total number of instances of the form mais, have this meaning, all of them forming part of the fixed expression n’en pouvoir mais (‘to not be able to go on any longer’). All the remaining 1,650 16th c. tokens represent the adversative conjunction. Potentially temporal/aspectual uses of plus constitute a slightly smaller, but broadly comparable, 7.86% of the total number of tokens of that marker in the BFM and 8.85% of the 16th c. DMF tokens. The remaining tokens are used as adverbs of quantification or degree, as in (29)-(30): (29) Reis Evander e Catellus E des altres cinc cenz u plus Furent ateint e abatu, (Wace, Brut, p. 637, v. 12238, 1155 – from BFM) ‘The kings Evander and Catellus and five hundred or more of the others were caught and killed,’ (30) Dunc li remembret de sun seinor celeste, Que plus ad cher que tut aveir terrestre. (Alexis, p. 95, v. 58, c. 1050 – from BFM) ‘Then he remembers his heavenly lord, whom he holds more dear than all earthly possessions.’

In the case of plus, I speak of “potentially” temporal/aspectual meaning because the marker is in certain contexts ambiguous between a continuative sense and an interpretation as a marker of quantity or degree of something non-temporal.17 In (31), for instance, plus can be interpreted as being part of the negative marker ne…plus, or as modifying the noun desplesir (‘displeasure’), in which case ne alone is the negative marker. In Modern French, this would correspond to a combination of the standard clausal negator pas with quantifying plus (ne…pas plus, ‘not… more’), a combination which, as we saw in Section 2 above, is not possible when plus functions as an n-word.

. In principle, mais could be interpreted as similarly ambiguous in certain examples, but given that, as stated above, this marker is not unambiguously attested with a meaning of quantity or degree, I take it that its intended meaning is continuative in the examples in question.


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

(31) A Dieu plaise que je ne vive gueres ! Au moins fussés vous quite de moy et n’eussés plus de desplesir de moy. (QJM, p. 9, c. 1400 – from BFM) ‘May it please God that I not live much longer! At least you’d be rid of me and would not have (even) more displeasure from me/and would no longer have displeasure from me.’

5. Uses of temporal/aspectual mais and plus in Medieval French Tables 5–6 provide an overview of the different contexts of use of (potentially) temporal/aspectual mais and plus in the data base. Contexts have been divided into three types in the case of mais: i. Negative contexts, i.e. strong negative-polarity contexts, where the standard clause negator ne appears in the same clause; ii. Affective contexts, i.e. weak negative-polarity contexts; iii. Polarity-neutral contexts. Table 5. Contexts of use of mais Period Context type

11th c.

12th c.

13th c.

Negative

5 (100%)

Affective

0

1 (50%) 64 (18%)

Polarity-neutral

0

1 (50%)

0

14th c.

15th c.

277 (79%) 13 (93%) 20 (87%) 10 (3%)

1501–1550 1551–1600 3 (100%)

0

0

3 (13%)

0

0

1 (7%)

0

0

0

In the case of plus, two further context types have been added: iv. Negative ambiguous contexts, where the marker cooccurs with ne, but where it cannot be determined with absolute certainty whether ne…plus is temporal/ aspectual in meaning (equivalent to Modern French ne…plus ‘no longer’) or indicates the absence of an added quantity (equivalent to M odern French ne… pas plus ‘not more’); v. Affective ambiguous contexts, where plus may either be read as meaning ‘any longer’ or as indicating an added quantity, i.e. meaning ‘more’. As Table 6 below clearly shows, up until the 16th c., a substantial portion of the occurrences of plus in both negative and affective contexts are not clearly temporal/aspectual in meaning, but are potentially interpretable as adverbs of quantity or degree. It is plausible that these ambiguous instances provide bridging contexts (Heine 2002) for the meaning extension that plus underwent. That assumption is rendered initially problematic by the fact that there are no examples of ambiguous contexts prior to the appearance of occurrences of plus that are clearly © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

temporal/aspecual in meaning. For one thing, however, that may simply be due to the sparsity of both 11th and 12th-century texts in the data base. Secondly, in eight of the nine earliest unambiguous examples (from Philippe de Thaon’s Comput, ca. 1113–1119), plus occurs in connection with a speech act verb (cf. (32)), while the six ambiguous examples from that same text all have plus in connection with support verb constructions with speech act nouns as the direct object, as in (33). While syntactically different, these two types of constructions are semantically equivalent (i.e. to produce additional speech ≡ to continue to speak); and it would thus have been easy for speakers to extend the use of plus from the s upport verb construction to speech act verbs proper. (32) N’e[n] voil ore plus parler, char ore vus voil nuncer Des signes dum parlai Quant des jurz traitai Que Egyptïen truverent Qui mult sage gent erent,. (Comput, p. 16, v. 1181, 1113 or 1119 – from BFM) ‘I don’t want to speak of that any longer, for now I want to tell you about some signs that I talked about when I dealt with the days that the Egyptians, who were very wise people, found,’ (33) Mais de ceste raisun Ne ferai plus sermon, Kar ore voil cumencer Altre dunt voil traiter. (Comput, p. 28, v. 2034, 1113 or 1119 – from BFM) ‘But about this topic I will produce no more speech/I’ll speak no longer, For now I want to begin something else that I wish to deal with.’ Table 6. Contexts of use of plus Period Context type

11th c.

12th c.

13th c.

14th c.

15th c.

1501–1550 1551–1600

Negative

0

13 (68%) 155 (63%) 34 (51%) 40 (34%) 142 (73%)

Negative ambiguous

0

6 (32%)

94 (90%)

40 (16%) 24 (36%) 34 (29%)

13 (7%)

3 (3%)

Affective

0

0

36 (15%)

4 (6%)

30 (25%)

35 (18%)

6 (5%)

Affective ambiguous

0

0

16 (6%)

5 (7%)

14 (12%)

3 (1.5%)

0

Polarity-neutral

0

0

0

0

0

1 (0.5%)

1 (1%)

The data do not appear to yield any patterns which might explain why the frequency of use of temporal/aspectual mais drops so dramatically after the 13th c., eventually resulting in the complete disappearance of the marker in the course of the 16th c. In the 13th c., where the most substantial number of occurrences of both mais and plus are found, the two markers are comparable in terms of the range of tenses they co-occur with. From the 14th c. onwards, mais becomes confined to the simple finite indicative tenses. However, it continues to occur across present, past and future contexts, so the reduced range may be attributable simply © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

to the considerably smaller number of tokens contained in the Middle French data. The two markers likewise turn up in similar proportions in main and subordinate clauses across the centuries. Finally, in the 13th c., they co-occur with a comparable range of verbs, including the verbs être (‘to be’), avoir (‘to have’), modal verbs followed by infinitives, support verb constructions, and full verbs belonging to a variety of semantic classes. The subsequent reduction in the frequency of mais is not accompanied by a reduction in the basic types of verbal construction it can occur in. The possibility remains that dialect competition may have been a factor. As stated above, however, I have found no indication in the literature of different preferences for either plus or mais in different langue d’oïl dialects. For the present, I can therefore offer only a speculative attempt at explaining why mais disappeared as an n-word: In general, most of the erstwhile competitors of the present-day set of n-words seem to have been eliminated in the course of Middle French, for reasons that have yet to be fully elucidated. If, in this particular competition, it was mais rather than plus that was lost, that may be linked to the polysemous nature of these two markers. As we have seen, French plus is polysemous between a temporal and a quantifying sense, which are closely related, and which, as shown in Table 6, frequently overlap in Medieval French. Unlike plus, however, mais does not appear to have been used as a non-temporal degree adverb in Medieval French (cf. Section 3 above), so the only alternative use of the French descendant of Latin MAGIS was as an adversative conjunction. The temporal and the adversative senses of mais are not directly related to one another, but only indirectly, via the use of MAGIS as a degree marker (cf. Note 13 above), and it may therefore have been more difficult for language users to reconcile the two as different senses of one and the same item than it is to reconcile the two senses of plus. The adversative sense of mais being vastly more frequent than the temporal sense, and given that temporal mais had a strong competitor with apparently identical meaning in plus and was thus essentially redundant, I suggest that temporal mais may have been lost largely for reasons of cognitive economy.18 6. Medieval French mais/plus and the quantifier cycle Although Latin MAGIS and both Latin and French quantitative PLUS/plus were/ are polarity-neutral, the figures in Tables 5–6 above do not seem to support . As pointed out by an anonymous referee, there was, of course, no necessity for temporal mais to be lost, even in these circumstances. An alternative scenario might have seen a division of labor developing between plus and mais, for instance along the lines of English anymore vs any longer (cf. I don’t want to see you anymore/?any longer vs If you stay in bed any longer/*anymore, you’ll miss the show).


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

the assumption that temporal/aspectual mais/plus were likewise originally polarity-neutral, and that their n-word uses developed gradually out of any such polarity-neutral uses, via weak negative-polarity contexts, similarly to the way in which the nominal n-words personne, rien and aucun are assumed to have developed (cf. S ection 2 above). Rather, the temporal/aspectual uses of mais/plus must have developed originally in contexts of negative polarity, and it is clear from the data that although they are found very sporadically in polarity-neutral contexts in Medieval French, at no time did they become properly entrenched in such contexts. The question now is whether these uses developed first in weak negative- polarity contexts, and from there to contexts of strong negative polarity, or whether – like jamais – their evolution may more likely have been in the opposite direction, thus falsifying Haspelmath’s (1997: 230ff) unidirectionality claim for indefinites (cf. Section 2 above). Tables 5 and 6 show that in the BFM negative uses precede NPI uses in the case of both markers. That said, absolute numbers of occurrences of either item are small in both the 11th and the 12th century, so although noteworthy, these figures alone cannot be considered conclusive. Indeed, an anonymous referee pointed out, with reference to an earlier version of this paper, that an alternative Old French database, Textes de français ancien (henceforth TFA), contained 12th c. examples of weak negative polarity plus, a use not found in my BFM data. In a second stage, it was therefore considered desirable to supplement the 12th c. BFM data with some additional data from the TFA. Specifically, a search was carried out for instances of plus in TFA texts from the mid-12th century (1150–1155). That period, comprising a total of seven texts, yielded 596 occurrences of plus, 46 (i.e. 7.7%) of which were deemed to have (potentially) temporal meaning, a rate comparable to that found in the BFM data. The breakdown of the contexts of occurrence in the TFA alone can be seen in the second column of Table 7 below, while the third column combines the TFA data with the 12th c. BFM data: Table 7. Contexts of use of plus in the TFA (1150–1155) and in the TFA + BFM (12th c.) Context type Negative

TFA alone (1150–1155)

TFA + BFM (12th c.)

26 (56.5%)

39 (60%)

12 (26%)

18 (27.7%)

Affective

3 (6.5%)

3 (4.6%)

Affective ambiguous

5 (10.9%)

5 (7.7%)

Polarity-neutral

0

0

Total

46

65

Negative ambiguous


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

While the addition of the TFA data confirms that temporal plus could, indeed, be used in weak negative polarity contexts at an early stage, it fails to show that NPI uses were diachronically prior to the use of the marker in strong negative polarity contexts. Indeed, the fact that no examples of temporal plus were found in positive contexts, paired with the significantly higher proportion of occurrences in strong negative contexts (particularly if tokens that are ambiguous between a temporal and a quantitative interpretation are removed, in which case strong negative contexts account for 92.9% of all the 12th c. examples), arguably supports the idea that it is the strong negative use which is central, whereas the affective uses are likely to be derived. Closer analysis of the data reveals some further patterns suggesting that Medieval temporal plus may have had an inherently negative semantics. Firstly, the marker is found in preverbal position in negative contexts (i.e. preceding the negative marker ne) already in the earliest texts, and as Table 8 below shows, preposing accounts for a substantial portion of all the examples of plus in negative contexts. Preposing is indicative of a negative semantics, as – in European languages, at least – NPIs with temporal adverbial functions overwhelmingly tend to be ungrammatical when preceding their trigger (cf. Hoeksema 2000: 132f). Inherently negative adverbials of this type have no such restrictions (although preposing may be stylistically marked), cf. the contrast between (34) and (35): (34) *Any longer he couldn’t bear to keep it up. (35) No longer could he bear to keep it up. Table 8. Occurrences of preposed plus in negative contexts 12th c. 10.8% (7)

13th c.

14th c.

15th c.

1501–1550

1551–1600

27% (52)

19% (11)

59% (44)

29% (45)

8% (8)

Secondly, as shown in Table 9 below, the majority of tokens of plus as an NPI occur in those weak negative-polarity contexts that are intuitively most closely related to negation, i.e. in a clause governed by a negated main clause, as in (36), after the negative preposition sans (‘without’), as in (37), and in a total of three instances, in a clause whose main clause contains a semantically negative verb, as in (38): (36) Cil qui n’a esté compainz de la queste del saint Graal si se departe de ci, car il n’est pas droiz qu’il i remaigne plus. (Graal, p. 268, c. 1220 – from BFM) ‘Anyone who has not been a companion in the quest for the Holy Grail must now leave this place, for it is not right that he should remain here any longer.’


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

(37) Si s’en aloit contremont vers les nues, et maintenant ovroit li ciex por lui recevoir, et il entroit enz sanz plus demorer. (Graal, p. 131, c. 1220 – from BFM) Thus he ascended towards the clouds, and now heaven opened up to receive him, and he went inside without delaying any longer.’ (38) …parquoy sur tous autres le vous devroie desconseillier et, qui plus est, deffendre de plus vous mectre en telz perilz ; (Saintré, p. 146, 1456 – from BFM) ‘…wherefore above all others I ought to advise you against it and, what’s more, forbid you to put yourself in such peril anymore/again;’ Table 9. Percentage of tokens of NPI plus in clauses following an explicit or implicit negation 12th c. 12.5% (1)

13th c.

14th c.

15th c.

1501–1550

1551–1600

58% (30)

89% (8)

70% (31)

74% (28)

83% (5)

Of these three, non-finite clauses introduced by sans is the dominant environment. As we saw in Section 2 above, this specific environment is to all intents and purposes the only one in which plus functions as an NPI in Contemporary French. Now, although traditionally classified as a weak negative-polarity contexts, nonfinite clauses introduced by sans may in fact, as argued by de Swart (2010: 213ff), be more correctly analyzed as an actual negative context, in as much as sans establishes negative concord with n-words occurring within the same clause (cf. (39)), but results in double negation if an n-word occurs in a governing clause, as in (40) (both from de Swart (2010: 213), her (8a-b)): (39) Il est parti sans rien dire à personne. ‘He left without saying anything to anybody’ = ‘He left having said nothing to anybody.’ (40) Personne n’est parti sans rien dire. ‘Nobody left without saying anything.’ = ‘Nobody left having said nothing.’ = ‘Everybody said something before leaving.’

If tokens of plus following sans are counted as negative rather than affective, the proportion of affective uses of plus starts to appear considerably less important overall, as seen in Table 10:


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

Table 10. Negative vs affective uses of plus (sans classified as affective > sans classified as negative) Period/ Context type

12th c.

13th c.

14th c.

15th c.

1501–1550

1551–1600

Negative

87.7% (57) > 79% (195) > 86% (58) > 63% (74) > 80% (155) > 93% (97) > 89.2% (58) 84% (207) 90% (60) 84% (99) 91% (175) 98% (101)

Affective

12.3% (8) > 10.8% (7)

21% (52) > 16% (40)

13% (9) > 37% (44) > 19.5% (38) > 10% (7) 16% (19) 9% (18)

5% (6) > 2% (2)

In the case of mais, the evidence is somewhat weaker. This marker only rarely occurs in preverbal position in negative environments, namely in 5% (15) of the 13th c. examples, and in 13% (3) of those from the 15th c. In the 13th c., which is the only period where a significant number of tokens are found in weak negativepolarity contexts, 34% (22) of these are found in clauses governed by explicit or implicit negation, while the remainder occur in a range of other types of affective contexts, viz. conditionals, interrogatives, comparatives, temporal clauses introduced by avant que (‘before’), and relative clauses following a superlative antecedent. Interestingly, mais never occurs after the preposition sans in my data. Still, the proportions of affective uses are relatively small (except for the 12th c., where only two tokens of temporal mais were found, however) or, in several periods, non-existent. In any case, in terms of assessing the hypothesis of a quantifier cycle in French, plus is the crucial case, as it is the only one of the two markers that has survived to form part of the closed Modern French set of n-words. Like that of the other temporal adverbial member of that set, jamais (cf. Hansen 2012), the evolution of plus fails to provide support for the generalized cyclical development set out in Table 3 above. For the same reason, the two temporal n-words likewise fail to support Haspelmath’s (1997) hypothesis that where the same indefinite is used in both negative contexts and weak negative-polarity contexts, the latter uses must be prior to the former. Rather, the evidence presented here and in Hansen (2012) suggests that, at least within the domain of negative polarity, indefinites can develop in different directions, from NPIs into negative indefinites but also vice versa. Whether Jäger (2010) is correct in also allowing for developments from negatively polar items to positively polar or polarity-neutral ones, on the other hand, is not an issue that can be addressed on the basis of the data reported in either this study or Hansen (2012). The fact that jamais and plus both have adverbial functions, while those n-words that seem to conform to the quantifier cycle, i.e. personne, rien, and aucun, are all nominals, might seem to suggest that some essential difference between


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

adverbial and nominal items could be responsible for the different evolutions of the markers, and that the assumption of an “argument cycle”, at least (as originally positied in Ladusaw 1993), could thus be upheld. That is, however, immediately undermined by the fact that the nominal n-word nul, which is also a component part of the locative adverbial nulle part, the only one of the French n-words to have an actual negative etymology, also developed NPI-uses during the transition from Latin to French (cf. Buridant 2000: 135; Ingham 2011), as exemplified in (41): (41) Et s’il y trouve nul ne son mestre ne autre, … que il le fera savoir au preudome. (13th c. – cited in Ingham 2011: 445 – his (6)) ‘And if he finds anyone there either his master or someone else, … that he will let the gentleman know.’

Nor is there strong reason to suppose that similar directions of evolution found with jamais and plus can somehow be attributed to their adverbial status, for, while it appears that it was in both cases their use in negative contexts that gave rise to their being extended to weak negative-polarity contexts, the two items differ markedly in the extent to which the NPI uses became entrenched. As shown in Table 2 above, these two adverbials are situated at opposite ends of the spectrum in Modern French, with the nominal n-words in the middle. Possibly, this difference is due to the fact that plus was and is polysemous between a temporal sense, nowadays found (almost) exclusively in negative contexts, and a quantifying sense (predominantly) found in non-negative contexts, these two senses having thus more or less divided up semantic space between them. Jamais, on the other hand, has only ever been used with temporal meaning, and is thus in less need of a strong contextual clue such as presence/absence of negation to its precise sense. 7. C onclusion The evidence reviewed in this paper shows that the functional category, or paradigm, of n-words in French is neither a synchronically nor a diachronically homogeneous one. On the contrary, individual members of the category exhibit very different developmental trajectories and different distributional behaviors that cannot simply be attributed to argument vs non-argument status. It is clear that, even if there is no unidirectional quantifier cycle in French, the n-words of Modern Standard French have nevertheless undergone a process of grammaticalization in sense that the language has witnessed the gradual emergence of a closed set of items which are obligatorily used to express quantifier negation, and which are syntactically confined to contexts of (strong, and to varying degrees, weak) negative polarity. In other words, paradigmaticization has


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

taken place (cf. Lehmann 1985). There is every reason to believe that language users perceive the n-words as forming a functional category, and thus as sharing certain crucial grammatical and semantic features. Indeed, the perception of shared properties among different linguistic items is presumably a prerequisite for paradigmaticization to occur in the first place. It appears equally clear, however, that alongside this level of generalization, speakers can and do maintain an awareness of idiosyncratic synchronic properties of individual members of the paradigm. Moreover, a given item can simultaneously be perceived as a member of different types of functional categories or paradigms. Thus, temporal/aspectual plus is not only a member of the category of n-words in contemporary French, but also belongs to the category of phasal adverbs in that language, along with déjà, encore, toujours and enfin (Hansen 2008). The present study thus provides further support for the idea, already presented in Hansen (2008, 2012) that functional paradigms are not essentially linguistic, but rather pragmatic, entities. Paradigmatic properties are those that are saliently perceived to be shared between members in many, if not all, communicative contexts. They may come in overlapping clusters, such that there is no requirement that all members possess the exact same set of properties, nor are they required to possess shared properties to exactly the same degree. The relationship between a paradigm and each of its members, and between different paradigms sharing some of the same items as members, can thus be conceptualized as a Gestalt structure, where either the paradigm or any invidual member can become foregrounded at any given time. The principle can be illustrated visually by the widely known image in Figure 1 below. This image can be perceived either as a young woman who is turning her face away from view, or as an old woman tucking her chin into her fur coat. What you interpret as the young woman’s nose becomes a wart on the nose of the old woman, while the old woman’s mouth becomes a ribbon around the young woman’s neck. Just as one and the same feature plays different roles within the two different images, so one and the same linguistic item can have different statuses within different functional categories. What distinguishes plus within the category of n-words is principally, on the one hand, its adverbial function, whereby it forms a subgroup together with jamais and nulle part, contrasting with the subgroup consisting of personne, rien, and aucun, which are characterized by having argument functions, and on the other hand, its aspectual meaning, whereby it stands in contrast to the purely temporal marker jamais. Within the category of phasal adverbs, on the other hand, plus stands out mainly because of its association with negative polarity.


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

Moreover, just as the viewer will focus on a single image at a time and p otentially on a specific feature of that image at the expense of the whole, so – I argue – the language user when using a given functional item in a given context, will focus on that item as a member of one particular category, and s/he may focus on either the item itself or on the paradigm.

Figure 1. Old/young woman Gestalt

In either case, the focus on one Gestalt or feature of a Gestalt at the expense of other aspects of the whole means that certain properties of either the paradigm or the individual item are ignored. Where idiosyncratic properties of individual items are frequently ignored because a paradigm is foregrounded, analogical change is likely to take place, but paradigmatic pressure can equally well be resisted, as, on the one hand, paradigms do not have inherently greater cognitive prominence than their members and, on the other, they may be in competition with other paradigms. The consequence for grammatical descriptions of the system of negation in Modern French (and presumably in many other languages as well) is a certain, crucially unavoidable, heterogeneity that cannot easily be reduced to the operation of a few simple principles.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and Daron Burrows (Oxford) for helpful discussion of a number of examples from my data base. The usual disclaimers apply.


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

Data bases BFM = Base de français médiéval: 〈http://txm.bfm-corpus.org/bfm/〉 DMF = Dictionnaire du moyen français: 〈http://www.atilf.fr/dmf/〉 TFA = Textes de français ancien: 〈http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/TLA/〉

References Buridant, Claude. 2000. Grammaire nouvelle de l’ancien français. Paris: SEDES. den Dikken, Marcel. 2002. Direct and parasitic polarity item licensing. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 5: 35–66. DOI: 10.1023/A:1021208200150 Déprez, Viviane. 2011. Atoms of negation: An outside-in micro-parametric approach to negative concord. In The Evolution of Negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, Pierre Larrivée & Richard P. Ingham (eds), 221–272. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: 10.1515/9783110238617.221 Déprez, Viviane & Martineau, France. 2004. Micro-parametric variation and negative concord. In Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 258], Julie Auger, Clancy Clements & Barbara Vance (eds), 139–158. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ducrot, Oswald & Vogt, Carlos. 1979. De magis à mais: Une hypothèse sémantique. Revue de Linguistique Romane 43(171–172): 317–341. Foulet, Lucien. 1946. Le plus quantitatif et le plus temporel. In Etudes romanes dédiées à Mario Roques par ses amis, collègues et anciens élèves de France, 131–147. Paris: Droz. Foulet, Lucien. 1965. Petite syntaxe de l’ancien français, 3rd edn. Paris: Honoré Champion. Guerzoni, Elena & Sharvit, Yael. 2007. A question of strength: On NPIs in interrogative clauses. Linguistics and Philosophy 30: 361–391. DOI: 10.1007/s10988-007-9014-x Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. 2008. Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues. A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs [Current Research in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface 19]. Oxford: Elsevier & Leiden: Brill. Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. 2009. The grammaticalization of negative reinforcers in Old and Middle French: A discourse-functional approach. In Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics [Studies in Pragmatics 7], Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen & Jacqueline Visconti (eds), 227–251. Bingley: Emerald & Leiden: Brill. Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. 2011. Discussion of Viviane Déprez: “Atoms of negation. An outside-in micro-parametric approach to negative concord.” In The Evolution of Negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, Pierre Larrivée & Richard P. Ingham (eds), 273–283. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: 10.1515/9783110238617.273 Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. 2012. On the evolution of temporal n-words in Medieval French. Language Sciences 34(1): 76–91. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2011.06.003 Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. 2014. Cyclicity in semantic/pragmatic change: Old French ja between Latin IAM and Modern French déjà. In Discourse and Pragmatic Markers from Latin to Romance [Oxford Studies in Historical Linguistics 9], Chiara Ghezzi & Piera Molinelli (eds), 139–165. Oxford: OUP. Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite Pronouns. Oxford: Clarendon.


The grammaticalization of negative indefinites 

Heine, Bernd. 2002. On the role of context in grammaticalization. In New Reflections on Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds), 83–101. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hoeksema, Jack. 2000. Negative polarity items: Triggering, scope, and c-command. In Negation and Polarity. Syntactic and Semantic Perspectives, Laurence Horn & Yasuhiko Kato (eds), 115–146. Oxford: OUP. Hoeksema, Jack. 2007. Parasitic licensing of negative polarity items. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 10: 163–182. DOI: 10.1007/s10828-007-9012-y Hoeksema, Jack. 2013. Polarity items in Strawsonian contexts – A comparison. In Beyond Any and Ever. New Explorations in Negative Polarity Sensitivity [Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 262], Eva Csipak, Regine Eckardt, Mingya Liu & Manfred Sailer (eds), 47–78. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Ingham, Richard P. 2011. Grammar change in Anglo-Norman and Continental French: The replacement of non-affirmative indefinite nul by aucun. Diachronica 28(4): 441–467. DOI: 10.1075/dia.28.4.01ing Jäger, Agnes. 2010. Anything is nothing is something. On the diachrony of polarity types of indefinites. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28: 787–822. DOI: 10.1007/s11049-010 -9113-1 Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and Other Languages [Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Historisk-Filologiske Meddelelser I, 5]. Copenhagen: Høst og Søn. Klein, Wolfgang. 1992. The present perfect puzzle. Language 68(3): 525–552. DOI: 10.2307 /415793 Klima, Edward S. 1964. Negation in English. In The Structure of Language. Readings in the Philosophy of Language, Jerry A. Fodor & Jerrold A. Katz (eds), 246–323. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Ladusaw, William A. 1993. Negation, indefinites, and the Jespersen Cycle. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.General Session and Parasession on Semantic Typology and Semantic Universals, Joshua S. Guenter, Barbara A. Kaiser & Cheryl C. Zoll (eds), 437–446. Berkeley CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Laka Muzarga, Miren Itziar. 1990. Negation in Syntax: On the Nature of Functional Categories and Projections. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. Lehmann, Christian. 1985. Grammaticalization. Synchronic variation and diachronic change. Lingua e stile XX(3): 303–318. Marchello-Nizia, Christiane. 1997. La langue française aux XIVe et XVe siècle. Paris: Nathan. Martin, Robert. 1966. Le mot rien et ses concurrents en français (du XIVe siècle à l’époque contemporaine). Paris: Klincksieck. Martineau, France. 1994. Movement of negative adverbs in French infinitival clauses. Journal of French Language Studies 4: 55–73. DOI: 10.1017/S0959269500001976 Moignet, Gérard. 1976. Grammaire de l’ancien français. Paris: Klincksieck. Muller, Claude. 1991. La négation en français. Geneva: Droz. Offord, Malcolm. 1976. Negation in “Berinus”: A contribution to the study of negation in fourteenth century French. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 92(3–4): 313–385. DOI: 10.1515 /zrph.1976.92.3-4.313 Payne, John. 1985. Negation. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 1, Timothy Shopen (ed.), 197–242. Cambridge: CUP. Rowlett, Paul. 1998. Sentential Negation in French. Oxford: OUP.


 Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen de Swart, Henriëtte. 2010. Expression and Interpretation of Negation. An OT Typology. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3162-4 Togeby, Knud. 1974. Précis historique de grammaire française. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. van der Auwera, Johan. 1998. Phasal adverbs in the languages of Europe. In Adverbial Constructions in the Languages of Europe, Johan van der Auwera & Donall P.Ó Baoill (eds), 25–145. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110802610.25 van der Auwera, Johan & Van Alsenoy, Lauren. 2011. Indefinite pronouns, synchrony and diachrony: Comments on Willis. In The Evolution of Negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, Pierre Larrivée & Richard P. Ingham (eds), 325–345. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: 10.1515/9783110238617.325 Willis, David. 2011. Negative polarity and the quantifier cycle: Comparative diachronic perspectives from European languages. In The Evolution of Negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, Pierre Larrivée & Richard P. Ingham (eds), 282–323. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: 10.1515/9783110238617.285 Willis, David, Lucas, Christopher & Breitbarth, Anne. 2013. Comparing diachronies of negation. In The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, Vol. I: Case Studies, David Willis, Christopher Lucas & Anne Breitbarth (eds), 1–50. Oxford: OUP. Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2008. Negative concord in syntactic agreement. Ms, University of Amsterdam.
