This paper presents a nanosyntactic account for negation in le bon usage French (Grevisse & Goosse [1936] 1993, Rooryck 2010) and in colloquial French. The analysis captures the obligatory presence of ne and pas for the expression of sentence negation in le bon usage French, whilst also accounting for the loss of ne in colloquial French. The difference between ne and pas in le bon usage French boils down to a structural difference: ne consists of only one feature or syntactic layer, a polarity feature, whereas pas consists of four features: focus, degree, quantity and negation proper. Only the combination of these five features can yield sentential negation. The analysis of colloquial French is that the lexical item pas starts spelling out five features, thus making ne redundant for the expression of sentential negation. Given that the use of negativemarkers in le bon usage French and colloquial French represents two important and well-described stages in Jespersen’s Cycle (Dahl 1979) this account is clearly relevant from a diachronic perspective.
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