Authors reveal the polarity effect on future tense in Parisian French, implying differences in semantic properties with negative expressions.
This squib brings attention to a longstanding puzzle regarding the mechanism driving the strong polarity effect on future temporal reference in French. Our study presents new findings from two corpora of Parisian French, where negative contexts with n-words significantly favour the usage of synthetic future compared to contexts with the negative marker pas , in contrast to Laurentian French, where synthetic future is predominantly used in all negative contexts. We suggest that these differences pattern with another variation phenomenon, negative concord, and that the solution to the puzzles lies in the syntactic and semantic properties of negative expressions.
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Liang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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