The loss of the negative morpheme, ne, in Parisian French

Abstract Data from a corpus of upper-middle class Parisian French demonstrate that the omission of ne in negative structures is most frequent among certain demographic segments of the population. This finding, together with historical evidence, suggests that the optional deletion of ne represents a continuing linguistic change, presaging theeventual total loss of ne . This change is most advanced in certain syntactic and phonetic contexts and in informal style.