Hedde H. Zeijlstra will be talking to us about his work on French ne pas, arguing that ne is an NPI. The talk is at 1:30 PM, at 726 Broadway 7th Floor conference room. Light snacks and beverages free for all who come.
Pas de problème
Abstract
Two main characteristics of French negation are (i) that the language is a so-called Negative Concord (NC) language; and (ii) that French exhibits so-called Embracing Negation. NC refers to the phenomenon where multiple negative expressions yield only one negation. Embracing Negation means that the language exhibits two negative markers that embrace the finite verb. This is illustrated in (1) where both ne and pas together express sentential negation.
(1) Jean (ne) mange *(pas)
Jean (NEG) eats NEG
At first sight the two phenomena seem to behave on a par. Both in combination with French negative indefinites and with French pas, ne may co-occur. But co-occurrence of pas with an n-word always yields a Double Negation (DN), i.e. a non-NC, reading.
In this presentation I argue that French n-words carry the same feature as n-words in other languages (following Zeijlstra (2004)): an uninterpretable formal negative [uNEG]. However, I argue that French ne does not carry any formal feature and is a plain Negative Polarity Item (NPI). Due to the NPI status of ne it follows that ne cannot invoke the presence of an abstract negative operator since that is restricted to n-words only (by virtue of their [uNEG] feature). Moreover, it also follows that pas cannot establish en NC relation with n-word. Since cases of ne ... pas can no longer been seen as cases of syntactic agreement, these constructions cannot act as a cue for language learners to assign a formal negative feature to pas. Pas is thus only lexically and therefore semantically, but not formally (i.e. morphosyntactically) negative.