Abstract
French is a classical example of Jespersen’s cycle. The term cycle suggests that the endpoint of the cycle is identical to the initial point. By discussing the various historical changes underlying the French cycle, we will show that the evolution is more spiral-like than cyclic: the language that seems to have completed the cycle has properties different from that of the initial language. We will also argue that, while a number of authors view the evolution as linear, going from Old French to Standard French, then to Colloquial French, Quebec French illustrating the end of the cycle, the facts rather suggest that a split between two dialects had occurred during the 16th century One dialect corresponds to Standard French, the other one led to Quebec French. We will propose an analysis of the facts.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, we leave aside the temporal adverbs plus ‘no more’ and jamais ‘never’, whose special behaviors set them apart and require independent studies. For a discussion, see Muller (1991).
- 2.
We assume that the negative spread observed between two or more negative indefinites, e.g. in Personne (ne) fait rien ‘Nobody does anything’, is due to the creation of a branching quantifier (for French: Moritz and Valois 1994; Déprez 1999, 2000; de Swart and Sag 2002; Labelle 2017; for a different analysis, see Zeijlstra 2004, 2010).
- 3.
- 4.
See Boerm (2008) for the observation that ne-drop was frequent in Judeo-French long before this feature appeared in French writings. For instance, in La Reine Esther, written in 1300, pas is used in the majority of negative clauses (63%, 76/121), and in 58% of these cases (44/76) ne is omitted (p. 249). Boerm argues that the Jewish merchants speaking Judeo-French had the sociolinguistic features of spreaders of linguistic change. If he is correct, the reanalysis of pas as a negative quantifier discussed in the text could have been influenced by Judeo-French.
- 5.
Negative interrogatives without ne seem to have found support in various levels of the society. On the one side, Vaugelas (1647) stated that questions without ne meant the same thing as those with ne, but were more elegant; on the other side, Martineau (2011) found that they were more frequent in low-class speech (19% in the 17th century) than in middle and high class speech (6%).
- 6.
Notice that this is the case even though polarity uses of the same indefinites continued to be attested in questions and in conditional sentences (e.g. Martineau and Déprez 2004). Following Labelle and Espinal (2014), we assume that two variants of the words coexisted for a while: a negative quantifier variant and a residual polarity variant limited to non-negative contexts.
- 7.
Dagnac observes cross-speakers differences in the possibility of negative doubling according to whether the negative word is mie or point.
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Labelle, M. (2019). The French Jespersen’s Cycle and Negative Concord. In: Arteaga, D. (eds) Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 95. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11006-2_8
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