The Variable use of ne in Negative Structures: An Apparent-Time Variationist Study of Synchronous Electronic French Discourse

• Main Author: Gould, Rebecca J.
• Other Authors: Williams, Lawrence
• Format: Others
• Language: English; French
• Published: University of North Texas 2010
• Subjects: French; language; linguistics; negation; French language > Negatives.; French language > Discourse analysis.
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc33157/

This study of the variable use of ne in synchronous electronic French discourse follows the methodological guidelines and the theoretical framework proposed and subsequently elaborated by Labov for analyzing variable features of language. This thesis provides a quantitative variable rule (i.e., VARBRUL) analysis including age as a factor group (i.e., independent variable), thereby making a new contribution to this area of inquiry. The data (50,000 words from the vingtaine 'twentysomething' channel and 50,000 words from the cinquantaine 'fiftysomething' channel) are a subset of 100,000 words from a corpus of one million words collected in 2008 by the thesis director from the public chat server EuropNet. This study aims to answer the following overarching question: To what extent does age-compared to other factors-influence the variable use of ne in verbal negation in synchronous electronic French discourse? In order to answer this question, and possibly others, the VARBRUL analysis will include age, subject (e.g., noun vs. pronoun), type of second negative particle (e.g., pas 'not', jamais 'never', personne 'no one'/'nobody', and so forth), as well as verbal mood/tense.