The purpose of this article is to delimit the role of pragmatic specialisation in the evolution of negation in French. The change in the marking of sentential negation is believed to proceed in characterised 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 specialised 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, which 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 reanalysed with default status in a grammatical paradigm.