Negation in Contact: French and Occitan

Abstract

Development of negative markers along the lines of the well‐known Jespersen's Cycle occurred in a wide number of languages. This article investigates the possibility of contact playing a role in such developments in Lengadocian Occitan. The evolution of negation in Lengadocian Occitan followed two main lines. It first developed a postverbal negative marker ges, until increased contact with French from the fifteenth century onwards meant that the language initially adopted the two main postverbal negative markers of French pas and point, in the form of their cognates pas and ponch. In the early modern period (fifteenth to eighteenth century), prolonged contact with French was a key factor in the ultimate selection of pas as the sole postverbal marker. But the pace of grammaticalisation of this marker in Occitan was quicker and went further than in French, in that from the eighteenth century pas is often the sole negative marker, and that it starts early on to appear together with negative polarity items. This means that when the preverbal negative marker disappears, negative concord is maintained, contrary to modern spoken French.