This special issue of the Journal of French Language Studies assembles a selection of papers presented at the conference ‘Negation and Clitics in Romance’, which took place in February 2012 at the University of Zurich. All contributions are devoted to sentential negation and/or clitics in French with a special focus on the various ways of interaction between these two linguistic categories. They are all concerned with central aspects of variation in the expression of negation (cf. the contributions by Hugues Peters, Paul Rowlett, Lene Schøsler and Harald Völker, Charlotte Meisner and Natascha Pomino) and subject clitics in French (Jennifer Culbertson and Géraldine Legendre, Michael Zimmermann and Georg Kaiser) with the contributions of Meisner and Pomino and of Rowlett explicitly investigating their morphophonological and syntactic interaction. The papers assembled all focus on contemporary French, with the exception of Lene Schøsler's and Harald Völker's contribution on Old French.

Both French sentential negation, with or without the preverbal clitic ne, and the realisation of clitic subjects, are well-known variables in French (for ±ne variation see e.g. Armstrong, Reference Armstrong2002; Armstrong and Smith, Reference Armstrong and Smith2002; Ashby, Reference Ashby1976, Reference Ashby1981, Reference Ashby2001; Coveney, Reference Coveney2002; for a general description of French and Romance clitics see Heap, Reference Heap2000 or Miller and Monachesi, Reference Miller, Monachesi and Godard2003). The French clitic paradigm is often described as moving down a grammaticalisation path from formally independent pronouns towards agreement affixes (cf. Lehmann, Reference Lehmann1985; Fuß, Reference Fuß2005). Some scholars have even gone as far as to describe modern French subject clitics as prefixed agreement morphemes expressing person and number of the inflected verb (see e.g. Auger, Reference Auger1994; Culbertson, Reference Culbertson2010; Culbertson and Legendre, Reference Culbertson, Legendre, Durand, Habert and Laks2008; Kaiser, Reference Kaiser, Stark, Schmidt-Riese and Stoll2008; Miller and Sag, Reference Miller and Sag1997; Roberge, Reference Roberge1990 and Zribi-Hertz, Reference Zribi-Hertz and Cinque1994), which results in a pro-drop analysis for Modern Colloquial French. Now, if French subject clitics are really becoming agreement markers, they should occur without exceptions and always in the same place, as affixes do. However, the situation of some French subject clitics, such as impersonal il, seems to be much more complicated: in some contexts, it can be easily omitted (e.g. Ø faut faire ça), while in other cases this seems hardly possible (e.g. *Ø pleut toute la semaine). This issue will be taken up by the contributions of Jennifer Culbertson and Géraldine Legendre, Michael Zimmermann and Georg Kaiser.

Recently, the interaction of French negation and the just mentioned reanalysis of subject clitics have been widely discussed in the context of a potential diglossia in contemporary French (cf. Massot, Reference Massot2010; Zribi-Hertz, Reference Zribi-Hertz2011 and the special issue of JFLS in 2013, vol. 23.1, edited by Benjamin Massot and Paul Rowlett, ‘L'hypothèse d'une diglossie en France’), where a systematic co-occurrence of ne-omission and obligatory clitic subjects (being reanalysed as subject agreement markers), on the one hand (cf. e.g. Culbertson, Reference Culbertson2010: 98), and of ne-realisation and fully argumental clitic subjects, on the other, is argued for (see also Palasis, Reference Palasis2013, with evidence from acquisitional data). However, the precise nature of this interaction, which has been observed for quite some time (see e.g. Dufter & Stark, Reference Dufter, Stark, Marchello-Nizia and Combettes2007; Meisner, Reference Meisner and Neveu2010), has not yet been fully understood, neither for French, nor for other Romance varieties (cf. e.g. Zanuttini, Reference Zanuttini1997).

In contrast to the diglossic approach, ‘classic’ variational, variationistFootnote ¹ and sociolinguistic approaches to the two phenomena at hand consider them in principle as independent, though occasionally co-occurring variables triggered by extra- or intralinguistic factors (e.g. pragmatic or linguistic context, cf. Armstrong, Reference Armstrong2001, Reference Armstrong2002; Armstrong and Smith, Reference Armstrong and Smith2002; Coveney, Reference Coveney2002 on negation and Coveney, Reference Coveney2010; van Compernolle, Williams & McCourt, Reference van Compernolle, Williams and McCourt2011, Williams & van Compernolle, Reference Williams and van Compernolle2009 on clitic variation). The only paper of the present special issue that takes a direct stance and claims a third, intralinguistic explanation for the close interaction between ne and clitic subjects (i.e. neither diglossic nor extralinguistically triggered) and consequently rejects the diglossia hypothesis is the contribution by Charlotte Meisner and Natascha Pomino, while all other contributions try to model syntactically the striking variation phenomena in French negated imperatives (Peters, Rowlett) or with impersonal (expletive) clitic subjects (Culbertson and Legendre, Zimmermann and Kaiser).

In Old French, the variable to be investigated is not the omission of ne, but the optional pas and its variants, which appears to be obligatory only later (cf. Ménard, Reference Ménard1994, §283). The evolution from Old French sentential negation ne + Ø to Modern ne + NEG-PARTICLE is one of the important features of French morphosyntactic variation in diachrony. It reveals a major and still ongoing morphosyntactic change that has been described by Jespersen (Reference Jespersen1917): initially, ne was the unique preverbal particle of negation. Later on, a number of postverbal particles of reinforcement like pas, mie, point and others were grammaticalised and used together with ne, which nowadays may be dropped under certain conditions (see above). Up to now, the initial part of evolution has not yet been understood in all its aspects; thus, the diachronic variational linguistic study by Lene Schøsler and Harald Völker is trying to identify relevant factors for the absence or the presence of these elements of reinforcement in Old French.

Syntactically, Modern French bipartite negation has been described in multiple ways: following the ‘classical’ analysis, based on Pollock (Reference Pollock1989) (cf. Haegeman, Reference Haegeman1996; Rowlett, Reference Rowlett1998), it is conceived in terms of a negative functional projection NegP, whose specifier is occupied by the negative element pas, while ne is located in its head position. In the last decades, questions have been raised concerning the status of negation as a functional phrase. More recent approaches, such as the ones adopted by Biberauer and Roberts (Reference Biberauer, Roberts, Larrivée and Ingham2011), Déprez (Reference Déprez2003), Roberts (Reference Roberts2007) and Zeijlstra (Reference Zeijlstra2004), describe the co-occurrence of French negation particles ne and pas in terms of negative concord, in analogy to the multiple occurrence of n-words and negative markers in other Romance languages (e.g. the Italian negative marker non ‘no’ and n-words such as nessuno ‘nobody’ or niente ‘nothing’). These and related issues become clearer by analysing non-standard data such as negated imperatives with enclitics: dis-le pas, investigated by Hugues Peters.

In the following, we give a brief overview over our six contributions:

The contribution of Charlotte Meisner and Natascha Pomino (Universität Zürich), Synchronic variation in the expression of French negation: A Distributed Morphology approach, provides a new approach to variation in the expression of French sentential negation. Based on empirical evidence, the authors reconsider the influence of the grammatical subject on the absence and presence of the clitic negation particle ne. While ne absence and presence has been seen as a sociolinguistic variable, a stylistic marker or indicating the alternation between two different grammars of French, the authors claim that it is mainly dependent on the phonological form of the grammatical subject. In spoken French, lexical subjects and ‘heavy’ pronouns seem to favour ne presence, while ‘light’ clitics inhibit it. This empirical result is implemented within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, Reference Halle and Marantz1994).

Based on a recent syntactic approach (Shlonsky, Reference Shlonsky and Rizzi2004; Rizzi Reference Rizzi and Haegeman1997), Paul Rowlett's (University of Salford) contribution French imperatives, negative ne, and non-subject clitics discusses the clitic placement in positive and negative imperatives in French. While in positive imperatives all clitics appear obligatorily after the verb, negative imperatives include proclitics (at least in the standard language). These differences are accounted for by the assumption of a feature checking mechanism either of several features on one head, or of feature spreading across several head positions: in positive imperatives all features are checked on one head before clitics merge, hence these will be enclitic. In contrast, negation intervenes between the relevant features, provokes checking in multiple heads and blocks the enclisis, so that the clitics occur in preverbal position.

Hugues Peters (University of New South Wales, Australia) in his paper The morpho-syntactic status of ne and its effect on the syntax of imperative sentences argues against the status of ne as a negative particle. Ne does not determine the scope of negation with respect to other operators and does not have properties of a head (being optional). Rather, ne should be considered as an affix merged to a Tense projection (TNSP) endowed with sub-label features of polarity. It is argued that this proposal provides a unified solution for the distributional properties of ne in finite and non-finite contexts alike, with a special emphasis on Standard French negative imperatives, which are characterised by the proclisis of argument clitics, crucially linked to properties of Tense, as opposed to their enclisis in positive imperatives, and in non standard spoken registers where ne is absent (prends-le pas ‘don't take it’).

Jennifer Culbertson (George Mason University, USA) and Géraldine Legendre (Johns Hopkins University, USA), Prefixal agreement and impersonal il in Spoken French: Experimental evidence, argue that il in impersonals (and other constructions with less than fully referential subjects) is an agreement marker, like all other subject clitics in colloquial French, which can be dropped under some circumstances. They report the results of a controlled acceptability judgement task designed to probe features which affect the availability of il-drop. Their findings suggest that verb frequency, subcategorisation by the verb for a quasi-argument vs. true expletive, and modal vs. non-modal status influence il-drop. Finally they set out some implications of the observed variation for an analysis of subject clitics as agreement affixes in Spoken French.

Michael Zimmermann's and Georg Kaiser's (Universität Konstanz) paper On expletive subject pronoun drop in Colloquial French also looks into the intriguing characteristic of Colloquial French to have expletive subject pronouns non-expressed in impersonal constructions. The authors establish that different conceptions of this characteristic as (further) evidence for the approach to the clitic subject pronouns in terms of inflectional affixes prove to be inadequate. Rather, the non-expression of expletive subject pronouns is shown to be syntactically restricted. In light of the additional insight that this phenomenon represents the continuation of a grammatical trait of older stages of French, an account is put forward which argues that the non-expression of the expletive subject pronouns in Colloquial French follows from the same reasons as the non-expression of subject pronouns in Medieval French, namely the left-peripheral movement of the finite verb.

Lene Schøsler's (Københavns Universitet) and Harald Völker's (Universität Zürich) paper on Intralinguistic and extralinguistic variation factors in Old French negation with ne-Ø, ne-mie, ne-pas and ne-point across different text types is motivated by the wish to find relevant factors that favour the existing variants of sentential negation in Old French – with Old French being a period of transition from ne-Ø to ne+pas. In order to identify factors of influence on the variable NEG with or without pas, mie and point, the authors analyse two subcorpora of two different text types (narrative and charters). The choice of the tested factors implies (extralinguistic) factors like diatopic and diastratic ones as well as intralinguistic factors like transitivity of the verb, word order and clause type. One of the results is the probable relevance of clause type and the influence of socially definable (diastratic) groups. In addition to these findings, the two different text types shed some light on relevant text type differences in diachronic empirical research.