Evidence from a correspondence corpus for diachronic change in French indefinites 1450–1715

Abstract

In this study the changing distribution of French indefinite forms in different clause types is studied diachronically using a corpus of personal letters written between the Middle French and Classical French periods. The data is interpreted using Haspelmath’s 1997 semantic map of indefinites, and it is shown that the re-categorisation of quelque as an ordinary positive indefinite is associated with a major change in the use of the hitherto all-purpose indefinite aucun , leading ithe latter to become an n-item in Modern French. This analysis contributes to an account of the evolution of syntactic negation emphasising micro-parametric factors involving the properties of individual lexical items, rather than a macro-parametric change affecting the structural representation of negation.

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