Some remarks on the diachrony of French negation
- Resource Type
- article
- Authors
- ROBERTS, Ian
- Source
- DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada. January 2000 16
- Subject
- French Negation
Syntactic Change
Determiner System
Economy
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 0102-4450
Based on the history of negation in French, this paper proposes a parametrization of how languages may morphologically express the logical structure of negation provided by UG. It is argued that the change of French negation is driven by a general economy principle governing language acquisition, which favors shorter chains over longer ones. It is also claimed that this change correlates with a change in the determiner system which leads negative chains to develop from indefinite chains