Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:25:02.940Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sentential Negation in North-eastern Gallo-Romance dialects: insights from the Atlas Linguistique de la France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2019

Heather Burnett Open the ORCID record for Heather Burnett [Opens in a new window]
Heather Burnett*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (CNRS-Université Paris Diderot)
*
Email: heather.susan.burnett@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article argues that data from the Atlas Linguistique de la France (ALF, Edmont and Gilliéron, 1902–1910) can shed light on the fine-grained syntax of sentential negation in the Oïl dialects spoken in North Eastern France, Belgium and Switzerland. The Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in this area possess a larger variety of negative structures than those found in (Standard) French: in addition to ne…pas, ne can be followed by negations mie, pont or even appear alone. Although the dialects under study are highly endangered, I show how we can use syntactic data ‘hidden’ in the ALF to study their syntactic patterns. I present a quantitative study of variation in sentential negation in authentic transcriptions and French translations of the 22 negative data points in the ALF at 150 points in France, Belgium and Switzerland (N = 2989). I show that the pont form is significantly more frequent in negative constructions with ‘weak NPs’ (de phrases) and that there is a significant correlation between dropping of secondary negation and the ability of the secondary negation mie to be realized as an enclitic -m. This study supports Dagnac (2018)’s conclusion that the ALF is an invaluable tool for the study of syntactic microvariation in France.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2: Langues régionales: models and methods , July 2019 , pp. 189 - 207
Check for updates
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank audiences at the University of Vienna and Université Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle, Julie Auger, Guylaine Brun-Trigaud, Hilda Koopman, Fabio del Prete, Juliette Thuillier, and especially Anne Dagnac for their helpful comments. This research was undertaken in the context of the SyMiLa project, funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-12-CORP-0014).

References

Baiwir, E. and Renders, P. (2013). Les atlas linguistiques sont-ils des corpus? Corpus, 12: 27–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barbiers, S. (2009). Locus and limits of syntactic microvariation. Lingua, 119 (11): 1607–1623.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., Walker, S., et al. (2016). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using eigen and s4. R package version, 1 (7): 1–23.Google Scholar
Bourcelot, H. (1966). Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Champagne et de la Brie. Paris: Editions du CNRS.Google Scholar
Brun-Trigaud, G., Le Dû, J., and Le Berre, Y. (2005). Lectures de l’Atlas Linguistique de la France de J. Gilléron et E. Edmont. Du temps dans l’espace. Paris: CTHS.Google Scholar
Bruneau, C. (1949). La négation en wallon namurois. In Mélanges de philologie romane et de littérature médiévale offerts à Ernest Hoepffner par ses élèves et ses amis, Paris: Les belles lettres, pp. 45–52.Google Scholar
Brunot, F. and Bruneau, C. (1912). Archives de la parole: enquête dans les Ardennes. Gallica: Bibliothèque nationale de France.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K. and Trudgill, P. (1998). Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cinque, G. (1996). The antisymmetric programme: Theoretical and typological implications. Journal of Linguistics, 32: 447–464.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cinque, G. (1999). Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-linguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cornips, L. (2002). Variation between the infinitival complementizers om/voor in spontaneous speech data compared to elicitation data. In: Barbiers, S., Cornips, L. and van der Kleij, S. (eds), Syntactic Microvariation. Amsterdam: Meertens Institute, pp. 75–96.Google Scholar
Dagnac, A. (2015). ‘Pas’,’mie’,’point’ et autres riens: de la négation verbale en picard. In: Pitar, M. and Goes, J. (eds), La négation: Études linguistiques, pragmatiques et didactiques. Artois: Artois Presse Université, pp. 129–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dagnac, A. (2018). SyMiLa and the Atlas linguistique de la France: A tool for the study of Gallo-Romance syntax. Glossa, 3 (1): 85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, P. (1985). Grammatical constraints in phonological change: Unstressed* a in Southern France. Orbis, 31: 169–189.Google Scholar
Edmont, E. and Gilliéron, J. (1902–1910). Atlas linguistique de la France. Paris: Champion.Google Scholar
Godard, D. (2004). French negative dependency. In Corblin, F. and de Swart, H. (eds), Handbook of French Semantics. Stanford: CSLI Publications, pp. 351–389.Google Scholar
Goebl, H. (2003). Regards dialectométriques sur les données de l’Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF): Relations quantitatives et structures de profondeur. Estudis Romànics, 25: 60–117.Google Scholar
Guilliot, N. and Becerra-Zita, S. (in press). Negative Concord and Sentential Negation in Gallo. In: Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2016: selected papers from Going Romance 2016. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hopcroft, J., Motwani, R. and Ullman, J. (2013). Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and computation (3rd edition). Boston, MA: Pearson.Google Scholar
Marchello-Nizia, C. (1979). Histoire de la langue française aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Paris: Bordas.Google Scholar
Marie, E. (2012). Dictionnaire normand français: d’après un inventaire des usages en Cotentin. Bayeux: OREP.Google Scholar
Martineau, F. (2009). Modeling change: a historical sociolinguistics perspective on French negation. In: YKawaguchi, ., JDurand, . and MMinegishi, . (eds), Corpus and Variation in Linguistic Description and Language Education. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 159–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muller, C. (1991). La négation en français. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar
Pollock, J.-Y. (1989). Verb movement, universal grammar and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry, 20: 365–424.Google Scholar
QGIS Development Team (2015). QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source. Geospatial Foundation.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2016). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Remacle, L. (1952). Syntaxe du parler wallon de La Gleize, volume 3. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar
Temple, R. A. (2000). Old wine into new wineskins. A variationist investigation into patterns of voicing in plosives in the Atlas Linguistique de la France. Transactions of the Philological Society, 98 (2): 353–394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuaillon, G. (1975). Analyse syntaxique d’une carte linguistique: Alf 25: ‘où vas-tu?’. Revue de Linguistique Romane, 39 (153–154):79–96.Google Scholar
Zanuttini, R. (1997). Negation and Clausal Structure: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar