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Morphosyntactic and phonological constraints on negative particle variation in French-language chat discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2008

Rémi A. van Compernolle
Rémi A. van Compernolle
Affiliation:
University of North Texas
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Abstract

This study investigates the variable presence or absence of the negative morpheme ne in online French-language chat environments. The data indicate an overwhelming preference for the omission of ne in most instances of verbal negation, which corroborates previous studies of ne in everyday conversational French. VARBRUL analyses revealed four principal results: (i) subject type (i.e., noun phrase [NP], pronoun, or inferred subject) is the most influential factor; (ii) NPs favor ne presence irrespective of the conditioning factors considered in this study; (iii) the variable presence of ne is conditioned by phonological factors within the subject pronoun category; (iv) the type of second-negative present (i.e., pas vs. second-negative other than pas) influences ne retention in inferred subject environments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 317 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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