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French imperatives, negative ne, and non-subject clitics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2013

PAUL ROWLETT
PAUL ROWLETT*
Affiliation:
University of Salford
*
Address for correspondence: Paul Rowlett, School of Humanities, Languages & Social Sciences, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT, UK e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article focuses on the behaviour of negation and clitics in the context of French imperatives. Standard descriptions contrast positive Fais-le ! (with enclisis) with negative (Ne) le fais pas ! (with proclisis). I adopt a view of imperatives in terms of a pragmatic irrealis mood feature associated with Rizzi's (1997) exploded CP and defective/impoverished morphology which allows inflection and irrealis mood features to be checked on a single functional head. Thus, positive imperatives can check all their grammatical features before merger of any clitics, which (following Shlonsky, 2004) will therefore be enclitic. The presence of negation, when realised as a grammatical feature on an (overt or null) functional head within the clausal trunk, prevents this from happening because negation intervenes between the relevant inflection and mood features in the universal hierarchy underlying the Rizzi/Cinque exploded CP/IP. Outside cliticisation contexts, the difference has no surface impact: Viens ! vs. (Ne) viens pas ! In cliticisation contexts, in contrast, there is a surface difference: negative imperatives cannot check all their inflectional features at the point at which clitics are merged, and clitics will not therefore be enclitic. Regionally/stylistically marked forms like Fais-le pas !, in which proclisis and negation co-occur, must be deemed to have a radically different structure, with no negative feature projected within the inflectional domain. Such forms are argued to be a natural (and therefore expected) innovation within Jespersen's cycle of diachronic development.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 1: Negation and Clitics in French: Interaction and variation , March 2014 , pp. 29 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

1

Acknowledgements: Versions of this material were presented at the Romance Linguistics Seminar in Cambridge in January 2006 and at the Negation and Clitics in Romance conference in Zurich in February 2012. My thanks to the organisers and participants of the conference, as well as to the guest editors and reviewers of this special issue of JFLS. The Zurich conference illustrated very clearly the similarity of my own approach to that of Hugues Peters (see Peters, this volume). The analysis of the empirical issue at the heart of the paper touches on a number of major areas of syntactic theory, especially in section 3, which are expounded only to the extent that they illuminate the issue at hand; a fuller treatment could have been provided were it not for space limitations. The usual disclaimers apply. Abbreviations used: Ag = agent; Th = theme; Re = recipient; imp = imperative; neg = negative; pos = positive; sg = singular; pl = plural; ind = indicative; sub = subjunctive; pres = present; KP = case phrase; i = inflection; irr = irrealis.

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