Du lexique à la grammaire : la négation en français

Résumé 0

When it comes to negation, the Romance languages have generally stuck to the Latin model (non), which remains unchanged in Italian and is only slightly different in Spanish (no). In French, however, it’s a different story and a more inventive one, involving two negative particles, the second of which originally provided a literal and precise meaning. For example , je ne marche pas(“not a single step”) , je ne vois point(“not even a dot”) , je ne bois goutte(“not even a drop”) , je ne mange mie“not the slightest crumb”… The discontinuous monemes that survive in French today ( ne… pas, ne… point, and the less frequent , ne… guère) thus started life in quite a different way. This paper will attempt to retrace their journey from an originally unlimited source of lexical forms to the particularly limited grammatical units used to express negation in French today.

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