Ne deletion in Picard and in regional French: Evidence for distinct grammars

Julie Auger | Indiana University

Anne-José Villeneuve | Indiana University

Ne deletion is arguably the best studied variable in French. Despite differences in overall rates of deletion, linguistic factors governing deletion pattern very similarly in most varieties. The comparative study presented here offers a new perspective by using ne deletion as a criterion to differentiate two closely-related languages, French and Picard. While patterns of ne deletion in the variety of French under study are similar to those found in other French varieties, ne in Picard behaves differently from its French counterpart, with respect to both frequency of deletion and linguistic factor effects. We investigate patterns of ne deletion in three bilingual speakers for whom we have both written and oral Picard, as well spoken French. We compare their French data with those of monolingual French speakers from the region. This study contributes additional linguistic evidence for the claim that Picard and French are distinct languages.

Keywords: collocations, French, language change, langues d’oïl, ne deletion, negation, Picard, quantitative methods, variation, variationist sociolinguistics

Published online: 26 September 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.24.16aug

Cited by

Cited by 11 other publications

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2019. Building on an old feature in langue d’Oïl: interrogatives in Vimeu Picard. Journal of French Language Studies 29:2 ► pp. 209 ff.

Dagnac, Anne, Heather Burnett, F. Neveu, G. Bergounioux, M.-H. Côté, J.-M. Fournier, L. Hriba & S. Prévost

2016. Concordance négative optionnelle : contrastes forts et faibles entre picard et québécois. SHS Web of Conferences 27 ► pp. 13003 ff.

Hall, Damien

2017. In The Handbook of Dialectology, ► pp. 474 ff.

Hall, Damien, Jonathan R. Kasstan & David Hornsby

2019. Beyond obsolescence: a twenty-first century research agenda for the langues régionales. Journal of French Language Studies 29:2 ► pp. 155 ff.

Hornsby, David

2019. Picard: a mal aimé among regional languages?. Journal of French Language Studies 29:2 ► pp. 169 ff.

Massot, Benjamin, F. Neveu, G. Bergounioux, M.-H. Côté, J.-M. Fournier, L. Hriba & S. Prévost

2016. L’énigme des contraintes grammaticales sur les sujets poyaudins. SHS Web of Conferences 27 ► pp. 13005 ff.

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2013. ‘chtileu qu'i m'freumereu m'bouque i n'est point coér au monne’: Grammatical variation and diglossia in Picardie. Journal of French Language Studies 23:1 ► pp. 109 ff.

Villeneuve, Anne-José & Philip Comeau

2016. Breaking down temporal distance in a Continental French variety: Future temporal reference in Vimeu. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 61:3 ► pp. 314 ff.

Walkden, George & Anne Breitbarth

2019. Complexity as L2-difficulty: Implications for syntactic change . Theoretical Linguistics 45:3-4 ► pp. 183 ff.

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