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, 1976Ashby, , 1981Ashby, , 2001Armstrong 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. Nerealisation 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.
This special issue of LINGUA assembles five selected papers presented at the conference "Negation and Clitics in Romance" (University of Zurich, February 24 th and 25 th 2012) which focus on diachronic variation in the expression of (sentential) negation, widely known as the Jespersen cycle. The volume contains one paper on Italoromance, two on French, and two on Dutch, which ensures a certain comparative aspect. The morphological exponents of sentential negation are one of the most prominent examples of "cycles" in the diachrony of human languages (see e.g. van Gelderen 2009, 2011). Linguistic cycles are defined, in general, as linguistic changes "where a phrase or a word gradually disappears and is replaced by a new linguistic item" (cf. van Gelderen 2009:2). The so called Jespersen cycle, named after the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen 1 (cf. Jespersen 1917, 1924), describes the evolution of sentential negation as it has taken place or is currently taking place in many Indo-European languages such as English, French (cf. Larrivée/Ingham eds. 2011), and German (cf. Jäger 2008) as well as other Romance, Germanic, and Slavic varieties (negative cycles have been described e.g. for Russian, cf. Tsurska 2009, and Afrikaans, cf. Biberauer 2009). The Jespersen cycle involves the phonetic weakening of a preverbal negative marker, which tends to be doubled by a second postverbal element (such as Latin/French PASSUM > pas 'step', MICAM > mie 'crumb', GUTTAM > goutte 'drop' or PUNCTUM > point 'point'). These items, called minimizers, express small quantities and are seen initially as reinforcements of the first negative marker. Later on, they acquire an independent negative meaning and express sentential negation, first in co-occurrence with the former negative, and then alone, as the former negative is first cliticized and then lost in most cases. In light of some recent descriptions of the negative cycle (cf.
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