Reanalysis of negatives as polarity markers? The last 400 years of decline of the French preverbal negative clitic

• Semantic reanalysis does not cause loss of NEG1 in the Jespersen cycle.
• Declining NEG1 becomes more frequent in negative contexts in French.
• French sentential negation therefore really involves concord.
• Decline of French NEG1 caused by clitic status due to phonological reductions.

Typically, the evolution of negation involves an intermediate stage where a post-verbal negator doubles a preverbal marker. The decline of the preverbal marker is generally understood as a form of weakening, through mechanisms that remain rather vague in the literature. A precise hypothesis is proposed by Anne Breitbarth in her analysis of the negative cycle in Germanic (2009). She claims that the acquisition of negative status by the post-verbal item causes the preverbal item to become a polarity marker. The marker should therefore increasingly display a preponderance of uses in non-negative environments. Whether the predictions made by this dual reanalysis hypothesis are supported by the history of French negation is assessed in this paper. Data from 17th and 18th century vernacular French texts (Textes français privés des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles), as well as from the contemporary vernacular (Corpus de français parlé parisien des années 2000), show that the French preverbal negative contradicts the predictions of the dual reanalysis hypothesis in being increasingly used in negative environments. The causes of the decline of the preverbal negative in French are proposed to relate to its membership of a clitic cluster that is susceptible to phonological reductions.