The pragmatic motifs of the Jespersen cycle: default, activation, and the history of negation in French

The purpose of this article is to delimit the role of pragmatic specialization in the evolution of negation in French. The change in the marking of sentential negation is believed to proceed in characterized stages that would together constitute the Jespersen cycle. As a marker becomes the default expression of negation, the other markers do not necessarily fade away, and are maintained with specialized roles that include pragmatic functions. One such pragmatic function is that of activation (Dryer 1996), by which a proposition is presented as accessible to the hearer. Activation is shown to motivate the use of preverbal non that competes with 'ne' for several centuries. The claims that the emergence of postverbal pas in early French and the loss of 'ne' in contemporary spoken French are associated with activation are considered on the basis of novel data. It is concluded that pragmatic functions contribute to language change by providing marked options that may be conferred the default status in a grammatical paradigm.

Verbal negation in the inter-language of Arabic-speaking women acquiring English as a second language

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Quelqu'un n'est pas venu

Received wisdom has it that positive polarity items such as someone are incompatible with negation (?*Someone didn't come). Yet negative contexts are attested with such items not only in their specific indefinite reading (e.g. There's someone who didn't come), but also in their non-specific reading (It isn't the case that someone came). It is the non-specific reading of indefinite quelqu'un as subject of a negative verb phrase which is analysed by the present paper. On the basis of a corpus of attested cases, it demonstrates that polemic contrast is the crucial condition of the considered interpretation. As quelqu'un is included within a presupposed proposition that is rejected as a whole by negation, negative contexts can accommodate an item which does not normally yield the interpretations negation does. Interpretation is thus presented as process of mutual adjustment between contextual readings allowed for by items, readings which can be modalised by discursive values.

L'association négative:depuis la syntaxe jusqu'à l'interprétation

This book untangles the old grammatical paradox allowing for several negations within the same negative clause through his work of the scope of negations. The scope of each negation over the same predicate is what allows for concordant values. The frequent co-occurrence of negative items, cases of double negation and the expletive negative, as compared to constituent negation, help to demonstrate this. Analysis of these phenomena is based on a large body of data of different varieties of French considered in the light of historical, typological, and psycholinguistic tendencies. While extensive reference is made to current analysis, independence is maintained from any particular model. Starting from syntactic generalisations, the work provides an innovative solution to a classic interpretative issue.

L'interprétation des phrases négatives:portée et foyer des négations en français

The organization of linguistic meaning is animated by the duality between the sense of signs and the reference to the experience of speakers. How the presuppositions communicated by speakers emanate from the conventional value of signs and their cotextual dependencies is explored in this monograph on the scope and focus of negation. Negation can have scope over the predicate of the sequence in which it is used. The body of data brought together show that a variety of configurations preclude command of the predicate by the negative scoping over it, and that scope is a semantic rather than structural relation. Scope defines the domain in which an item can be focused by negation. Negative focus is dependent on the evocation of an alternative value, which may be generated by lexical antonymy, syntactic determination or contextual corrections. The study of focus and scope of negation on the basis of attested examples from different varieties of French demonstrates how the independently motivated semantic principles of relation to predicate and reference to an alternative value account for the observed effects.

The role of pragmatics for grammatical change: the case of preverbal non

What is the role of pragmatics in the evolution of grammatical paradigms? It is to maintain marked candidates that may come to be the default expression. This perspective is validated by the Jespersen cycle, where the standard expression of sentential negation is renewed as pragmatically marked negatives achieve default status. How status changes are effected, however, remains to be documented. This is what is achieved in this paper that looks at the evolution of preverbal negative non in Old and Middle French. The negative, which categorically marks pragmatic activation (Dryer 1996) with finite verbs in Old French, loses this value when used with non-finite verbs in Middle French. This process is accompanied by competing semantic reanalyses of the distribution of infinitives negated in this way, and by the co-occurrence with a greater lexical variety of verbs. The absence of pragmatic contribution should lead the marker to take on the role of default, which is already fulfilled by a well-established ne ... pas, pushing non to decline. Hard empirical evidence is thus provided that validates the assumed role of pragmatics in the Jespersen cycle, supporting the general view of pragmatics as supporting alternative candidates that may or may not achieve default status in the evolution of a grammatical paradigm.

Run-time resolution of uncertainty

Requirements awareness should help optimize requirements satisfaction when factors that were uncertain at design time are resolved at runtime. We use the notion of claims to model assumptions that cannot be verified with confidence at design time. By monitoring claims at runtime, their veracity can be tested. If falsified, the effect of claim negation can be propagated to the system's goal model and an alternative means of goal realization selected automatically, allowing the dynamic adaptation of the system to the prevailing environmental context. © 2011 IEEE.

Theorising noncitizenship:concepts, debates and challenges

Existing political theory, particularly which deals with justice and/or rights, has long assumed citizenship as a core concept. Noncitizenship, if it is considered at all, is generally defined merely as the negation or deprivation of citizenship. As such, it is difficult to examine successfully the status of noncitizens, obligations towards them, and the nature of their role in political systems. This article addresses this critical gap by defining the theoretical problem that noncitizenship presents and demonstrating why it is an urgent concern. It surveys the contributions to the special issue for which the article is an introduction, drawing on cross-cutting themes and debates to highlight the importance of theorising noncitizenship due to both the problematic gap that exists in the theoretical literature, and the real world problems created as a result of noncitizenship which are not currently successfully addressed. Finally, the article discusses key future directions for the theorisation of noncitizenship.

Theorising noncitizenship:concepts, debates and challenges

‘Noncitizenship’, if it is considered at all, is generally seen only as the negation or deprivation of citizenship. It is rarely examined in its own right, whether in relation to States, to noncitizens, or citizens. This means that it is difficult to examine successfully the status of noncitizens, obligations towards them, and the nature of their role in political systems. As a result, not only are there theoretical black holes, but also the real world difficulties created as a result of noncitizenship are not currently successfully addressed. In response, Theorising Noncitizenship seeks to define the theoretical challenge that noncitizenship presents and to consider why it should be seen as a foundational concept in social science. The contributions, from leading scholars in the field and across disciplinary backgrounds, capture a diversity of perspectives on the meaning, position and lived experience of noncitizenship. They demonstrate that, we need to look beyond citizenship in order to take noncitizenship seriously and to capture fully the lived realities of the contemporary State system. This book was previously published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.