The (slightly more) productive use of ne in Montreal French chat

This article investigates the productive use of ne in a 100,000 word corpus of online Montreal French chat discourse. It compares (i) rates of ne use in the present article with those previously reported for other French-language online communities as well as spoken Canadian French and (ii) the discursive-pragmatic function of productive ne in the online Montreal French chat community. The results show that ne is used productively less frequently in Montreal French chat than in other (European) French-language chat communities. At the same time, rates of ne use in the online Montreal speech community are higher than reported in previous studies of spoken Canadian French. Following the presentation of selected descriptive statistics, a qualitative analysis is presented in order to show how emphatic ne is jointly constructed in multiparty interactions.