Variable deletion of French ne: a cross-stylistic perspective

A Corpus Analysis of Intra- and Extralinguistic Factors triggeringne-Deletion in Phonic French

“…The former ones are conducted and recorded by the researcher himself, whereas the latter ones are structured and recorded by the speakers without the researcher. Probably, Armstrong's (2002) results are only decisive for very young speakers under similar conditions (the only difference between the interview settings is the absence/presence of the researcher). Facing these contradictory results, the influence of the communication situation requires a subtle reconsideration.…”

“…Ashby 1976, 2001, Armstrong 2002, Armstrong/Smith, 2002Coveney, 2002;Hansen/Malderez, 2004;Dufter/Stark, 2008). Diagram 1 sums up, in top down order starting with the most recent 2 study, the overall ne-realization found in previous corpus analyses during the last five decades.…”

“…Ashby, 1976Ashby, , 1981Ashby, , 2001Coveney, 2 2002;Hansen/Malderez, 2004) and also as a marker of informal speech style (cf. Ashby, 1976Ashby, , 1981Armstrong, 2002;Coveney, 2 2002) (cf. section 5.2).…”

“…Following the best practice of previous analyses (cf. Ashby 1976, 2001, Armstrong 2002, Armstrong/Smith, 2002Coveney, 2002;Hansen/Malderez, 2004;Dufter/Stark, 2008) and the additional considerations of Krötsch (2007), have been excluded all occurrences of negative elements that are not unambiguously expressions of sentential negation and offer a position for ne. The following expressions are or contain homonyms of forclusifs and have hence been excluded: pas mal ('beaucoup'), pas ('step'), pas vrai ('not true'), pas grand chose ('no big thing'), pourquoi pas ('why not'), de rien ('you are welcome'), si jamais ('if ever'), plus [plys] ('more'), plus grand ('bigger'), non plus ('neither') and all non restrictive uses of que, like alors que, bien que, parce que, pendant que as well as the relative pronoun, the conjunction and the interrogative pronoun que.…”

Catégorisations et représentations sociolinguistiques : les variétés stylistiques existent-elles ?

“…Depuis quatre décennies, la sociolinguistique a conceptualisé cette hétérogénéité fondamentale des langues sous la forme de variables sociolinguistiques, qui permettent au locuteur de dire la même chose avec des variantes de valeur sociale et stylistique différentes (Labov, 1972). Par exemple, la réalisation optionnelle du premier élément de la négation en français (je (ne) viens pas demain) (Armstrong, 2002) ou le fait de prononcer ou non certaines liaisons (De Jong, 1994) sont des variables sociolinguistiques bien décrites du français.…”