4.11.2022,10:30am-Negation in the Romance languages (and the case of Gallo-Romance)
“Synchronic and diachronic linguistics” seminar series.
- Conference room, building D3, third floor.
- On Microsoft Teams platform – Link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/channel/19%3a5abac259f6504107ad603a568426872b%40thread.tacv2/Generale?groupId=7ffce09f-3827-4982-94db-aa001ec81461&tenantId=c30767db-3dda-4dd4-8°4d-097d22cb99d3
Abstract
It is common in contemporary oral French for the syntactic construction in which negation, contrary to the standard (ne + pas), is formed through the use of the grammatical word pas (< passum) alone. Even in dubbing foreign films, for example, it is customary to use negation without the use of ne to characterize the familiar register:
“Je sais pas si nous avons chacun un destin…. ou si nous… si nous nous laissons porter par le hasard comme sur une brise.”
Forrest Gump (R. Zemeckis, 1994)
The Latin NOT, in fact, produced two different adverbs in French: non negation “strong” and predicative, and ne negation called “weak” and non predicative, which is syntactically linked to other elements. It is here that reinforced negation comes into play, in French as in other Romance languages, through the use of constructions involving adverbial, pronominal and nominal elements resulting from a process of grammaticalization.
We will analyze each of these two forms of negation, to go as far as the use of ne < nec and the ne said expletive, that is, without negative value.
Speaker
Valeria Russo
University of Lille
Coordinator
Claudio Iacobini
University of Salerno
