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Part of
The Diachrony of Negation
Edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti
[Studies in Language Companion Series 160] 2014
► pp. 213–234

Evidence from a correspondence corpus for diachronic change in French indefinites 1450–1715

| Birmingham City University
| University of Kairouan

In this study the changing distribution of French indefinite forms in different clause types is studied diachronically using a corpus of personal letters written between the Middle French and Classical French periods. The data is interpreted using Haspelmath’s 1997 semantic map of indefinites, and it is shown that the re-categorisation of quelque as an ordinary positive indefinite is associated with a major change in the use of the hitherto all-purpose indefinite aucun, leading ithe latter to become an n-item in Modern French. This analysis contributes to an account of the evolution of syntactic negation emphasising micro-parametric factors involving the properties of individual lexical items, rather than a macro-parametric change affecting the structural representation of negation.

Published online: 24 October 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.160.08ing
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Cited by 3 other publications

Gianollo, Chiara
2020. DP-internal Inversion and Negative Polarity: Latin aliquis and its Romance Descendants. Probus 32:2 ► pp. 271 ff. DOI logo
GIBSON, HANNAH
2021.  Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas & David Willis, The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, vol. II: Patterns and processes (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics 40). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 292.. Journal of Linguistics 57:3 ► pp. 675 ff. DOI logo
Larrivée, Pierre
2020. Sémantique de la grammaire, parcours typologiques et changement historique. Semiotica 2020:234 ► pp. 277 ff. DOI logo

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