Subject clitics and preverbal negation in European French: Variation, acquisition, diatopy and diachrony

Highlights

• Corpus-based analysis of subject clitics and negation in European French.

• New child data for Metropolitan French: 12,969 utterances by 19 children.

• The study of negation sheds light on the status of subject clitics.

• Speakers of Metropolitan French are diglossic (G₁ and G₂).

• G₁ displays agreement markers and simple negation.

Abstract

This contribution aims to propose a corpus-based analysis of variation and acquisition of subject clitics and preverbal negation in European French within a diglossic approach. The investigation collates previous and new, contemporary and diachronic, adult and child data from France and Belgium. The results point to an analysis of subject clitics as agreement markers in contemporary French. The negative particle ne is eliminated from the list of arguments against the morphological analysis of subject clitics, since negative utterances with agreement markers display postverbal negation only. A strong correspondence between two characteristics, i.e. morpho-syntactic status of subject clitics (agreement markers vs. arguments) and type of negation (simple vs. discontinuous), is established supporting the hypothesis on grammatical consistency and pointing to the existence of two different grammars of French (labeled chronologically G₁ and G₂). Diatopic data inform us that the correspondence seems to hold throughout France, but that diglossia does not appear to apply (or at least applies differently) when reaching the Belgian frontier. Finally, adult and child diachronic data (17th–19th century) also display an interesting co-occurrence in terms of clitics and negation, and invite us to further our understanding of the acquisition and processing of expletive clitics.

Introduction

The comparative study of preverbal clitics in colloquial and standard French represents a lively and inspiring area for research in a number of different perspectives. Indeed, the debate surrounding the distribution and forms of these preverbal elements, i.e. subject (je ‘I’, tu ‘you-sg’, il ‘he’, etc.), object (me ‘me’, te ‘you-sg’, le ‘him’, etc.), and adverbial clitics (y ‘there’, en ‘from there’), together with the negative particle ne, is of interest to (at least) morpho-syntacticians studying French in synchrony, diachrony, diatopy, and/or cross-linguistically, language acquisitionists, sociolinguists, and cognitive scientists. This contribution brings these complementary points of view together by examining subject clitics and negation in new child data and by considering the results in the light of the other perspectives. The main goals of this paper are to contribute to (i) the debates surrounding the morpho-syntactic status of subject clitics and preverbal negation in European French, and (ii) the discussion on the formalization of variation in this language in synchrony, diachrony, and diatopy. The investigation supports the following hypotheses: (i) subject clitics are agreement markers in colloquial French and syntactic subjects in standard French, and (ii) diglossia can account for this variation in France.

The article is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical debates on the morpho-syntactic status of subject clitics and preverbal negation, and on the formalization of variation in French. Section 3 examines subject clitics and negation in new child data from south-eastern France (12,969 utterances by 19 children). Section 4 turns to diatopy, and attempts to outline the geographical area where diglossia applies by examining fieldwork undertaken on child and adult central, Parisian, northern and Belgian French. Section 5 then assesses the plausibility of the current existence of diglossia in the brain/mind of French native speakers against adult and child data from the 17th century onwards. Finally, section 6 contains concluding remarks and leads for further research.