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The Diachrony of Negation
Edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti
[Studies in Language Companion Series 160] 2014
► pp. 185–212

The grammaticalization of negative indefinites

The case of the temporal/aspectual n-words plus and mais in Medieval French

| The University of Manchester
This chapter traces the diachronic evolution in Medieval French of two temporal/aspectual n-words of adverbial origin, the markers mais (< Lat. MAGIS ‘more, to a greater degree’) and plus (< Lat. PLUS ‘more’), equivalent to English no more/no longer, anymore/any longer, with a view to addressing two theoretical issues: (i) whether the evolution of indefinites is unidirectional, as claimed by Haspelmath (1997), or rather subject to a “random diachronic walk”, as suggested by Jäger (2010); (ii) whether the evolution of the French n-words can be described in terms of a general cyclical development parallel to that of the standard clause negator (commonly known as Jespersen’s Cycle). It is argued that, like those reported in Hansen (2012), the results of this study support the random walk hypothesis, and weakens the case for a quantifier cycle in French. Moreover, the results of the two studies suggest that functional categories, or paradigms, are pragmatic, rather than linguistic, entities.
Published online: 24 October 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.160.07mos
References (44)
Databases
BFM = Base de français médiéval: [URL]
DMF = Dictionnaire du moyen français: [URL]
TFA = Textes de français ancien: [URL]
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