Dimensions Stylistique et Phonétique de la Disparition de ne en français
Résumé
The issue investigated in this paper is that of the competition between different factors in driving linguistic change. Such competition is given detailed consideration through the classical case of contemporary French preverbal negative clitic ne, the loss of which is generally explained with reference to phonetic, syntactic and stylistic dimensions. In order to establish whether phonetics or register are preponderant determiners of the change, we look at (non) realizations of the negator in a corpus of television interviews. If phonetics is primary, the non-realizations of ne should be promoted by phonetic environments, in particular where several reduced clitics could yield ill-formed sequences of three consonants that the omission of ne would repair. If primacy is to be found in register, social variables such as gender, age and education should correlate to rates of use. Statistical analysis show that such a correlation does exist, involving not gender surprisingly, but mostly age and professional occupation. Perspectives for further research are suggested in the study of factor competition in other corpora and on other comparable questions.
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