Postverbal negators in Gallo-Romance

Abstract

This chapter offers a diachronic investigation of the Occitan post-verbal negators pas and ges through the analysis of a selection of narrative texts covering the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Addressing an area that has received little attention in the literature, this chapter identifies the first occurrences of these negative markers and discusses in detail their characteristics, their development and, for ges, its decline. The data suggest that while the minimizer pas possibly started off as a marker of emphatic negation, becoming also a negator of discourse-old propositions, the generalizer ges followed the inverse path, starting as a negator of a presupposition and gradually moving to be an emphatic negator. In the case of pas, its presence in negative polar questions may hold the key to understanding the reasons behind its establishment as the generalized negative marker in modern Languedocian.

Negation in Contact: French and Occitan

“…Paoli & Bach (2020) trace the development of postverbal negative markers throughout the middle ages in Lengadocian Occitan, through a diachronic corpus study of the main two postverbal markers for the period, ges and pas, which are not evenly distributed. This section builds on their results, as well as on a more detailed study of fifteenth century texts, in order to Somewhat parallel to the development of French postverbal negative markers pas, point or mie, Old Occitan progressively developed, though never in the same proportions, the use of a postverbal marker ges, whose use is on the rise from the early texts on to the fourteenth century (Paoli & Bach 2020). Ges is originally from Latin genus 'type, race', and does seem slightly different from other postverbal markers originally meaning very small quantities, as is the case in French (goute, mie).…”

“…All texts are in verse, mostly of a narrative or dialogical nature. They were chosen as representative of the Lengadocian dialect, and included the following texts (Paoli & Bach 2020:118) Another dramatic change occurs in the fifteenth century: at the same time, ges nearly ceases to be used, and two new postverbal markers appear, ponch and pas, as shown in Figure 2, based on the corpus and data used in Paoli & Bach (2020).…”

“…Paoli & Bach (2020) trace the development of postverbal negative markers throughout the middle ages in Lengadocian Occitan, through a diachronic corpus study of the main two postverbal markers for the period, ges and pas , which are not evenly distributed. This section builds on their results, as well as on a more detailed study of fifteenth century texts, in order to make a case for a contact‐induced change in the development of postverbal negative markers in Lengadocian Occitan.…”

“…Somewhat parallel to the development of French postverbal negative markers pas , point or mie , Old Occitan progressively developed, though never in the same proportions, the use of a postverbal marker ges , whose use is on the rise from the early texts on to the fourteenth century (Paoli & Bach 2020). Ges is originally from Latin genus ‘type, race’, and does seem slightly different from other postverbal markers originally meaning very small quantities, as is the case in French ( goute , mie ).…”

“…The article first reviews evidence for a contact situation between French and Lengadocian Occitan, and its periodisation, in order to assess at what time the effects of such contacts could have been felt in the structure of the language. It then proceeds to giving some quantitative data about negation in the history of French for the key medieval period, before turning to the developments of negation in medieval Occitan (including the importance of French as a contact language), based on findings in Paoli & Bach (2020). The last few sections assess the development of negation in Lengadocian Occitan during the early modern period (fifteenth to eighteenth century), a study that has never been attempted, before turning to the parallel loss of the preverbal marker in French and Lengadocian Occitan, and the further developments affecting this dialect of Occitan regarding negative concord, which show that the changes have gone further in Lengadocian Occitan than they have in French.…”