Contextual and Prosodic Disambiguation of French Concord and Discord

Introduction. Although commonly classified as a Negative Concord (NC) language since it readily allows single negation readings of Negative Concord Items (NCI) sequences (1c), French has widely been acknowledged to also tolerate Double Negation (DN) or Negative Discord, albeit as a marked option (De Swart, Corblin, 1996). This DN tolerance, diagnosed by Zeijlstra (2004) as a symptom of the still ongoing historical change of the doubling negative head ‘ne’, is often regarded as a French exception. However, in a series of cross-linguistic experiments using a picture choice preference task, DN readings were shown to not only be sometimes preferred over NC readings in French, but also to arise to a much greater extent than previously thought in solid NC languages, like Catalan (Deprez & als (2015) and Deprez et als (2014, to appear). These results clearly underscore the theoretical significance of determining where and how DN readings can emerge for a deeper understanding of the nature of NC. Although prosody is an often-cited influencing factor for DN tolerance, it was not taken into account in these previous experiments, which relied on written presentation, due, to a large extent, to the current penury of relevant information. Indeed, although prosodic research recently conducted on Catalan: Tubau et al., 2015, Catalan and Spanish: Prieto et al., 2013, and Dutch: Fonville, 2013) confirmed the disambiguating role of intonation for NC/DN interpretation for some (Cat,Sp) but not all (Dutch) of these languages, there are at present, for French prosody, only informal notes in the literature (Corblin 1996, Tovena&Corblin 2008), but no solid experimental evidence of the potentially distinct intonation profile of either NC or DN readings for multiple negative sentences. This paper presents the results of experimental work that sought to address this current gap. Here, we experimentally investigated the roles of context and prosody in the disambiguation of simple French transitive sentences with two NCI.