Negative Campaigning: Communicating Negative Meanings in French Presidential Debates Over Time

This chapter digs into new terrain in the well-studied field of French negation, exploring the discourse-pragmatic intersections of the loss and repurposing of ne (the original French negative ‘not’ out of Latin ne ‘not’) and its impact on pas (the now-basic French negative ‘not,’ originally and still, in other contexts, meaning ‘step’. Here, we dig into the Roitman corpus of French presidential debates to uncover how negative meanings are conveyed in argumentative discourse, in particular in the televised French presidential debates from 1974, 2012, and 2017. Given that ne-loss in real time is already convincingly documented in French in a