Where does French negation go, and when does the "ne" disappear?

In speech, the "ne" of French negation drops very often: out of 2 432 negations counted in a spoken corpus, Charlotte Meisner found 71 per cent without "ne" (CMLF congress, 2010). What carries the meaning is then the second word, and its position is what you need to know.

Has "ne" really disappeared from spoken French?

The clearest measurement comes from a corpus analysis presented in 2010 at the Congrès mondial de linguistique française by Charlotte Meisner, who went through the French section of the C-ORAL-ROM reference corpus, some 440 000 words in eight sub-corpora ranging from the most formal to the most casual. Of the 2 432 negations counted, 1 736 do without "ne", or 71 per cent, and 696 keep it.

Register weighs heavily: in private face-to-face conversation "ne" disappears in 89 per cent of cases, while it is pronounced in 64 per cent of cases in spontaneous public dialogue.

The most useful finding lies elsewhere: what predicts the presence of "ne" is not formality, it is the subject of the verb. With a noun as subject, "ne" is kept in 87 per cent of cases. With "je" it survives in only 15 per cent of cases, 9 per cent with "tu", 6 per cent with "ce". So "ne" has not disappeared: it holds firm wherever the subject is not a short word sitting in front of the verb.

Where do "ne" and "pas" go around the verb?

The Banque de dépannage linguistique of the Office québécois de la langue française states the rule in one sentence: "ne" comes before the verb or the auxiliary, and "pas" after it. Everything else follows.

• Simple tense: "Je ne comprends pas." The verb is bracketed.
• Compound tense: "Je n'ai pas compris." It is the auxiliary that is bracketed, not the past participle, and "je n'ai compris pas" is the most widespread mistake here.
• With an object pronoun: "Je ne le lui ai pas dit." Pronouns slip in between "ne" and the verb, in the order described in our article on "y" and "en".
• Infinitive: the two elements stay together and move in front, pronouns included: "Prière de ne pas fumer", "ne pas le regarder".
• Imperative: "ne" precedes the pronoun and "pas" follows the verb, according to the fiche on negative adverbs from the Centre collégial de développement de matériel didactique: "Ne me donne pas ce livre."
• With a semi-auxiliary: "Vous n'allez pas le regarder."

One thing to remember: "pas" attaches to the conjugated verb, never to the participle or the infinitive.

Rien, personne, jamais, plus: what replaces "pas"?

"Pas" expresses total negation. The other negative words are partial, and they take the place of "pas" instead of being added to it: "Je ne vois rien", not "je ne vois pas rien".

The CCDMD fiche gives the most useful equivalences, best learnt in pairs:

• "déjà" becomes "ne … pas encore"
• "encore" becomes "ne … plus"
• "toujours" becomes "ne … plus" or "ne … jamais"
• "quelque chose" becomes "ne … rien"
• "quelque part" becomes "ne … nulle part"
• "quelqu'un" becomes "ne … personne"

When these words are the subject, the logic does not change: "Personne n'est venu", "Rien ne marche". "Ne" remains compulsory and "pas" becomes impossible. The fiche from the same source on the pronoun "personne" notes that "personne n'a pas participé" is incorrect, and that the verb goes in the singular.

Several negative words, on the other hand, sit together perfectly well, and that is common rather than faulty: "Personne n'a jamais rien dit." Only "pas" is barred from such strings. Same logic for coordination: "Je n'ai ni œufs ni lait." The point comes up among our most frequent French grammar mistakes.

Why is "je sais pas" not the same thing as "il ne vient pas"?

The corpus brings out a few sequences that behave like single blocks. "C'est pas" accounts for 95 per cent of occurrences against "ce n'est pas", "je sais pas" for 95 per cent against "je ne sais pas", "y a pas" for 75 per cent against "il n'y a pas". Meisner notes that "je sais pas" is pronounced as one word, into which the form with "ne" no longer fits: the string has frozen.

The explanation she offers is syntactic before it is a matter of style: the short subject words "je", "tu" and "ce" occupy the slot of "ne", right in front of the verb, and take it from it. With a noun as subject the slot is free and "ne" comes back, hence the 87 per cent.

For a learner the instruction is workable: let "ne" go in those three or four sequences, keep it everywhere else, and above all as soon as your subject is a noun. That is what our article on speaking more naturally is aiming at.

What your own language does here is worth a detour. English hands the negation to an auxiliary that French does not have: "I don't know" makes you look for something to carry "don't", whereas French simply wraps two pieces around the conjugated verb. And English allows only one negative word per clause, which is why "Je n'ai jamais rien dit" looks wrong to an English ear although it is plain standard French. Reading it as "nobody ever said anything" rather than as a double negative is half the work done.

What these figures do not say

First warning: the 71 per cent applies to the negations counted in this corpus, not to speakers. A few very talkative people weigh heavily in a count of occurrences.

The second matters more: the figure does not travel. The same measurement gives 0.5 per cent of "ne" pronounced in a Montreal corpus recorded by Sankoff and Vincent, and 72.5 per cent in a French radio corpus analysed by Armstrong and Smith, against 29 per cent in Meisner's own. Between half a per cent and seventy-two there is no single rule of spoken French, only usages that depend on the country, the medium and the situation. Our article on fast spoken French deals with the other half of the problem, the ear.

This corpus dates from 2005, describes France only, and measures neither age nor social background. The author insists on a counter-intuitive point: the absence of "ne" is not a reliable marker of casual speech, and "ne" sometimes comes back out of over-caution in formal settings. In writing the question does not arise: "ne" is always written.

Choosing between "je sais pas" and "je ne sais pas" is therefore not a grammar decision, it is a decision about the situation, and a situation implies someone in front of you. At Frenchee, classes are live with qualified native teachers, one to one or in a small group of three to five students, with no subscription: enough to say thirty negative sentences in an hour and hear which ones landed. The level test takes a few minutes.

Sources

• Charlotte Meisner, the realisation of "ne" in spoken French, CMLF 2010
• Office québécois de la langue française, the position of "ne" and "pas"
• CCDMD, fiche on negative adverbs