This introduction presents very briefly some of the main issues currently discussed around negation particles and clitics in contemporary French and taken up by the six contributions it assembles, namely language change (grammaticalisation of clitics into agreement markers, completion of the Jespersen Cycle) vs. stable variation, and external (sociolinguistic) or internal (phonotactic, prosodic, or syntactic) factors triggering variation in both cases; the hypothesis of a potential diglossia in French opposing two grammars with considerable syntactic differences. Five out of six contributions focus on modern standard and non-standard varieties of French, with a formal theoretical background, while one shows a more philological-descriptive approach and is dedicated to Old French manuscripts.

This article discusses ne-variation in French sentential negation based on the phonologically transcribed corpus T-zéro (cf. Meisner, in preparation) which allows a new interpretation of the facts. In the last decades, sociolinguistic and stylistic approaches to linguistic variation in French (cf. Armstrong, 2001) have shown that extra-linguistic factors, such as the speaker's age, sex, social background or geographic origin as well as the communication situation may have considerable influence on variable ne-omission. However, in contrast to most sociolinguistic studies dedicated to this phenomenon (cf. Ashby, 1976, 1981, 2001; Armstrong and Smith, 2002; Coveney, 2002) we will focus on the linguistic factors influencing ne-variation, since their importance is empirically evident but not yet fully exploited on a theoretical level.

One leading assumption with respect to ne-variation in literature is that the particle ne is most frequently retained in combination with a proper name or a full DP and is commonly omitted when combined with clitic subjects. However, there are many exceptions to this rule which, as we argue, can be better explained by considering the phonological form of the involved subject. Ne-realisation is treated here as an inner-grammatical phenomenon that is triggered by context sensitivity with regard to the element to its left, i.e. usually the grammatical subject, and not as a consequence of ‘code-switching’ between two grammars nor as a sociolinguistic variable characterising certain groups of speakers in the Labovian sense (cf. Labov, 1972), since we seek to describe general variational tendencies, present in nearly all speakers of contemporary European French. Our analysis, which is implemented in a Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz, 1994), is compatible, however, with stylistic approaches to ne-variation, such as audience design (cf. Bell, 1984, 2001).

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.

This article argues that there is compelling evidence that French ne, even in dialects that still have this particle, is no longer negative, does not determine the scope of negation with respect to other operators, does not have properties of a head (optionality), and therefore cannot be analysed as the head of NEGP in Modern Standard French. Rather, ne should be considered as an affix merged to a Tense projection (TNSP) endowed with sub-label features of polarity. This article argues that this proposal provides a unified solution for the distributional properties of ne in finite and non-finite contexts alike. It especially provides an explanation for the structure of French negative imperatives, which are characterised by the proclisis of argument clitics (ne le prends pas ‘don't take it’), crucially linked to properties of Tense, as opposed to their enclisis in positive imperatives (prends-le ‘take it’) and in spoken registers where ne is absent (prends-le pas ‘don't take it’).

In Spoken Continental French, the subject clitic il can in some cases be dropped – for example in certain impersonal construction (e.g. faut que ‘is necessary that’). This phenomenon is of particular interest in the context of claims that this variety of French is in fact a null subject language, with subject clitics acting as agreement affixes rather than true arguments (e.g. Roberge, 1990; Auger, 1994; Culbertson, 2010, among others). Under this view, the il in impersonals (and other constructions with less than fully referential subjects) is likewise an agreement marker, which can be dropped under some circumstances. Here we report the results of a controlled acceptability judgement task designed to probe features which affect the availability of il-drop. Our findings suggest that verb frequency, subcategorisation by the verb for a quasi-argument vs. true expletive, and modal vs. non-modal status influence il-drop. We discuss implications of this variation for an analysis of subject clitics as agreement affixes in Spoken French.

This paper sets out to contribute to the debate on the morpho-syntactic status of phonologically weak or clitic subject pronouns in Colloquial French by discussing finite impersonal constructions in which the expletive subject pronoun is non-expressed. The paper provides arguments against an approach in terms of inflectional affixes, showing that the non-expression of this pronoun is in fact syntactically restricted. On the basis of the further finding that the non-expression of the expletive represents the continuation of a grammatical trait of older stages of the language in which the non-expression of subject pronouns was generally possible, a tentative proposal is put forward which crucially draws on information structure.

Old French sentential negation (NEG) represents an important morphosyntactic change that has been investigated by a large number of scholars from different theoretical approaches. From the 12th to the 14th (and mainly in the 13th) century, there are two variants of this variable in competition: NEG with only ne (the older variant) and NEG with ne + pas/mie/point, etc. The research presented in this paper has been motivated by the wish to find relevant factors for this variation in Old French. In order to identify factors of influence on the variable NEG with or without pas, mie and point, we analyse two subcorpora containing two different text types. The choice of the tested factors is rooted both in variational linguistics and in previous studies on Old French negation, implying (extralinguistic) diasystematic factors like diatopic and diastratic ones as well as intralinguistic factors like transitivity of the verb, word order and clause type. Main findings are the probable relevance of clause type and the influence of socially definable (diastratic) groups. Beyond this, the results across the two different text type are predominantly similar, but we found differences as well. This leads us to plead in favour of the importance of considering the factor text type while working on diachronic corpora.