<i>Que dalle</i>! The evolution of a French colloquial negation word

Abstract The present study constitutes a first contribution to the understanding of the French pronoun que dalle (‘nothing’ ) . First, we looked at its syntactic flexibility, its semantic strength in conveying zero quantification, and its pragmatic role in informal language. Then we compared que dalle with its near synonym rien and analysed its development. The results can be summarized as follows. On a descriptive level, we can conclude that, in spite of their different diaphasic distribution, que dalle functions in much the same way as rien , but the former differs from the latter in terms of syntax (subject position, attributive adjective), stylistics and especially pragmatics. On a methodological level, we hypothesized that que dalle originates in the exceptive structure ne…que (‘only’) but the corpus data were insufficient to demonstrate this assumption. On a theoretical level, different processes, i.e. lexicalization and grammaticalization, could be distinguished. We acknowledge that individual quantifiers can be very different in nature and have different diachronic paths: the development of que dalle differs from that of rien in its postverbal use, and it tends toward inherent negativity in fragment answers.