In order to understand the nature of the relationship among ne, pas, and the negative adverbs, one must appreciate something of the way the system of sen- tential negation in M odern French has evolved (see sections 3.1.1, 3.1.2, and especially 3.5.2). As discussed by Grevisse (1986: 1477 §973), Harris (1978: 23!29), Posner (1996: 302), W inters (1987: 28!30, 33!47), and, in more recent theoretical work, Pearce (1990, 1991, 1993), the canonically post-verbal mark- ers of negation in the modern language, that is, the negative adverbs/arguments and pas, were not originally negative. Rather, they were nouns denoting small amounts that came to reinforce non/ne; they were essentially emphatic elements
(Posner 1985a: 184). This development took place during the M iddle French period, from the twelfth century on (Harris 1978: 25).
The development has been accounted for on both phonological and syntactic grounds, and, in both accounts, the trigger can be seen as the initial grammatic- alization/weakening of non/ne, that is, its (re)analysis as NegE. On a phonological level, it has been suggested that phonetic weakening of the pre- verbal marker left it incapable of marking sentential negation on its own. Since it had not been possible to use non with a finite lexical verb since the early Old French period (according to Grevisse 1986: 1477 §973), another strategy needed to be developed to mark/reinforce sentential negation. On a syntactic level, the immobility of the pre-verbal marker, the very fact that it was always pre-verbal, meant that it was interpretatively inflexible. Negation expressed by the pre- verbal marker alone was always interpreted as an instance of absolute negation. In other words, the entire propositional content of the clause was being denied. It could not be used for local constituent negation (Grevisse 1986: 1482 §977), that is, to negate a subclausal unit, such as a purpose clause. Since the post- verbal markers of negation were distributionally more flexible, their position
could indicate the part of the proposition being negated.
French thus followed Jespersen’s Negative Cycle, with the erstwhile emphatic post-verbal elements, and pas in particular, losing their original (positive) value. They then came to carry clausal negation alone, with the pre-verbal negative marker ne subsequently and increasingly often being absent from spoken language, especially in interrogatives, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Harris 1978: 26) and, according to Price (1993: 191), at least, as early as the thirteenth century. In fact, the tendency for bipartite sentential negation to be replaced by single (post-verbal) sentential negation using pas is now so strong that, as I argued in chapter 1, in the modern language, the one-time exclusive bearer of sentential negation, pre-verbal ne, has lost whatever inherent negativity it had. W hatever negative interpretation can be assigned to this element is now due to its association with some other element marked [+N EG], such as pas. The link between ne and negation in M odern French is therefore indirect, to say the least. Of course, by virtue of (a) the licensing conditions assumed for ne in section 1.2.5, (b) the analysis of pas proposed in chapter 2, and (c) the nature of the spec-head relationship inherent in the N eg Criterion proposed in section 3.3, I have the means by which [+N EG] can be transmitted from pas to ne: movement of pas to SpecNegP followed by DA.
I claim that pas is the only overt post-verbal “negative” element in the standard modern language to be inherently marked [+N EG]. (See section 3.5.2, for my reasoning.) In contrast, the adverbs I have discussed in this chapter are not marked in this way; the elements plus, jamais, and guère are not inherently negative, and their co-occurrence does not therefore amount to NC. W hat I am claiming with respect to negative adverbs is supported by a number of facts, some of which have already been reviewed. First, “negative” adverbs still have some nonnegative uses. For example, jamais and plus (without ne, even in registers not characterized by “ne-drop”) are stylistic variants of un jour/en un temps quelconque ‘one day’/‘some time or other’ or encore ‘still’, respectively
10. A deletion-based analysis is in fact proposed for Standard Modern French in Escure (1974). 11. For further discussion of the interaction between verb position and negative adverb position, see Belletti (1990, 1992, 1994a, b) and Zanuttini (1994b, 1995).
(Gaatone 1971: 139, 151). In contrast, no positive use remains for the element
pas.
(45) a. Je ne crois pas que cet homme revienne jamais. I ne believe pas that this man return-S U B Jjamais
‘I don’t think that man is ever coming back.’ b. À jamais
to jamais
‘For ever.’
c. Si jamais tu reviens à Paris, . . . if jamais you return to P. ‘If you’re ever back in Paris, . . . ’
Second, as illustrated earlier, “negatives” can co-occur without negation being canceled. Third, in the patterns of NC in earlier varieties of French discussed in section 3.5.2, there is reason to believe that the only items entering into NC are
ne and pas, and not the negative adverbs discussed in this chapter or the nega- tive arguments analyzed in chapter 5.
Instead of being lexically marked [+N E G], I claim that the negative interpretation of the adverbs is to be attributed to the fact that they appear in the scope of an inherently [+N E G] operator. Of course, in standard metropolitan
M odern French, this inherently [+N EG] operator cannot normally be pas; otherwise, some deletion process would need to be invoked to make sure pas
does not surface in the syntax together with the adverb. However, given the10 account of sentences such as (43) and (44) proposed in section 1.2.4, and the AN- binding approach to NPI licensing adopted and modified in section 3.4.2, the non-overt counterpart of pas, namely Op, is an immediately obvious source of the negative interpretation of these adverbs. To account for the data in (43) and11 (44) while maintaining the conclusion that ne is not inherently negative in the modern language, I attributed the negative interpretation to a non-overt inherently negative operator: Op. Pre-verbal ne then acquires the [+N EG] feature from Op as a consequence of the mechanism by which ne is formally licensed, namely DA. Op is, of course, identical to pas, apart from the fact that it is non- overt. In the next section, I exploit Op and flesh out an analysis of negative adverbs.