4.5 Negation — ne … pas and its family — Epoché
What you will be able to do Negate any French verb by wrapping two words around it, and say why the second of the two is the one that carries the meaning. Swap the second word for four others to get no longer , never , nothing and nobody , the main members of the negative family, all in one pattern. Recognise, and eventually produce, the spoken register in which the first of the two words disappears entirely. Apply the rule from two lessons ago about what a negative does to an indefinite or partitive article, and say what English does instead at each of these points. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Je ne sais pas ! [1] I don't know! Elle ne parle pas anglais. [2] She does not speak English. Il ne respire pas ! [3] He's not breathing! Prerequisites : 4.4 — you should already be able to make an adjective agree and to place it correctly, because one of the sentences here negates a clause with an adjective in it. See 4.4 Grammar if you need it. Negation in French is built from two pieces, not one. The first piece goes in front of the verb, the second goes after it, and together they enclose the verb like a pair of brackets. That is the whole mechanism, and once you see it as a bracket rather than as two separate words you will stop losing one of them. Which is exactly what English speakers do. They produce the second piece, because it is the one that translates as not , and they drop the first, because nothing in English corresponds to it. The result is a sentence that a French speaker will understand and will also instantly place as either foreign or very colloquial, and those two impressions are unfortunately produced by the same error. The remedy is to learn the bracket as a single unit from the start: not a word plus a word, but one two-part frame with a verb inside it. There is a second reason to treat it as a frame. The first piece stays the same in every negative sentence in the language. The second piece is what you change to get a different kind of negation, and there are six common ones worth learning at this stage. So the system is one constant plus a short menu, which is a great deal less work than it looks like on the page. How English does it English negates with one word, French with two. Not is the core of English negation, and it sits after the first auxiliary verb. This is the single difference from which every mistake in this lesson follows. When you have learned that the French word after the verb means not , you have learned half of a frame and it feels like a whole word, so the other half gets dropped. English needs an auxiliary that French does not. To negate a simple English present tense you have to insert a verb that was not there before: I know becomes I do not know . French does nothing of the kind. The verb stays exactly as it was and the bracket goes around it. So the French negative is structurally simpler than the English one, which is a rare direction for this course. English forbids two negatives, French requires them. Standard English says I do not see anybody , using a negative and then a neutral word for the object. French says the equivalent of I do not see nobody , with the first piece of the bracket still there and the word for nobody as the second piece. To an English ear this looks like the double negative that schoolteachers ban. It is nothing of the kind: the two French words are the two halves of one bracket, and neither of them is complete without the other. English contracts the negative, French drops half of it. English shortens do not to don't and everyone, including a newsreader, uses the short form in speech. French does something that looks similar and is actually quite different: in ordinary spoken French the first half of the bracket is very often not pronounced. What survives is the second half, which is why a beginner who has been dropping the first half by mistake sounds, by accident, like a native speaker in a hurry. You should nevertheless learn to say both, because the full form is what you need in writing and in any formal register, and because you cannot reliably drop something you never had. English has no equivalent of the article rule. In English the object of a negated verb keeps whatever article it had. In French an indefinite or partitive article in that position collapses into the bare preposition, as you saw two lessons ago. There is nothing to transfer here, so the rule has to be installed from scratch, but there is also nothing competing with it. The bracket The frame has two positions. The first word goes immediately in front of the conjugated verb, after the subject; the second goes immediately after the conjugated verb. Nothing else may come between the first word and the verb except an object pronoun, which you will meet later in this volume. French English Je ne sais pas ! [1] I don't know! Elle ne parle pas anglais. [2] She does not speak English. Il ne respire pas ! [3] He's not breathing! Read the second sentence against its gloss and compare what happened to the verb. In the English, the verb had to surrender its ending to a borrowed auxiliary and revert to its bare form. In the French, the verb is exactly the same word it would have been in the affirmative, fully conjugated, with the bracket closed around it. That is the structural difference, and it is in your favour: you have nothing to rebuild. Notice also where the object goes — after the closing half of the bracket, at the very end. The bracket encloses the verb and nothing else. Before a vowel the first word loses its own vowel and attaches to the verb, exactly as the definite article does in front of a noun. That reduced form is visible in the sentences about the article later in this lesson, and it is one more reason the first word is easy to miss: in speech it is often no more than a single consonant leaning on the verb. The family: five things that can close the bra