The pragmatics of morphological negation: pejorative and euphemistic uses of the prefix non- in French

In this paper I examine a particular type of morphological negation in French, namely, nonprefixation on nominal bases (e.g. non-événement ‘nonevent’, non-violence ‘nonviolence’). Drawing on a wide range of authentic examples from the Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé (TLFi), the French literary database Frantext and the internet, I show that although the basic meaning of nonprefixation is negation, these types of lexemes may carry an additional nuance, which may be pejorative or euphemistic; hence the hypothesis defended in this paper that the prefix noncan also serve pragmatic purposes. In fact, some of the authors which have dealt with morphological negation in French (Gaatone 1971, 1987, Di Sciullo and Tremblay 1993, 1996, among others) or in English (Zimmer 1964, Algeo 1971, Bauer 1983, Horn 1989) have pointed out the meaning effects of nonprefixation. To develop these intuitions and to illustrate the pragmatic side of certain uses of the prefix non-, I build on the works by Ducrot (1980, 1984) and Horn (1985, 1989) and their account of the pragmatics of sentential negation and I propose to draw a parallel between morphological negation in the case of lexemes such as non-événement ‘nonevent’ and polemic and metalinguistic uses of sentential negation. Raktažodžiai: pragmatika, prancūzų kalba, non-, morfologija, neiginys, semantika.