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An Extra-Strong NPI ? Pantoute in Québec French

The goal of this paper is to identify a pattern of negative polarity item (NPI) distribution that, to our knowledge, has yet to be discussed in the literature. In particular, we will lay out the basic distribution of the adverb pantoute (pronounced /pã.tUt/), which can be roughly translated as English at all, in the variety of French spoken in the province of Québec. Although, in this paper, we will exemplify the relevant empirical pattern with naturally occurring examples from a Québécois literary corpus1 and native speaker judgements, it is our understanding (based on consultation with other speakers) that etymologically related elements in other dialects of French (ex. European French du tout; Acadian French en tout etc.) show a similar pattern2. We can first observe that, like English at all, pantoute cannot appear in an assertion in which it is not c-commanded by an appropriate negative operator. One such appropriate operator is the sentential negation marker pas ‘not’. Thus, based on the contrast in examples such as (1) and (2), we can conclude that pantoute is some kind of negative polarity item.