Negation Patterns in the Conversational French of Tours, France: A Next-Generation Update

Linguists have long observed variation in the use of the negative particle ne in French. Although this preverbal negative is required by standard French conventions regarding bipartite negation, ne occurs at low frequency in the negations of everyday spoken French. This study presents and analyzes a new corpus of sociolinguistic interviews recorded by the researcher in the city of Tours, France in 2024. The young adult speakers in the corpus were found to have an average ne-realization rate of 5.41%, which is significantly lower than the ne-realization rates reported by previous Tours negation studies in 1976 and 1996 but not significantly different from the results of a 2005 Tours study. Multiple linguistic and sociostylistic factors, including seriousness, emphasis, subject type, and phonetic environment, were found to influence the likelihood of ne-realization in negations.