A periodic hypothesis is that marked grammatical configurations associate to pragmatic values that distinguish them from the default option in a category. How do we know whether a marked desgin truly has a pragmatic value, and what the nature of that value is? This paper anwsers this question by exploring the pragmatic value of negative doubling in four French varieties. Whether the joint use of post-verbal negation with a n-word–elucidated by There wasn’t nobody meaning that nobody was there – is compliant to pragmatically-pertinent contextual coercion is investigated on the basis of real practice. The results show that negative doubling is featured by a pragmatic value, that there is a need to differentiate two types of pragmatic values (activation and emphasis), and that the failure of a categorical pragmatic value is related to the fairly higher frequency of the configuration in a variety.