On Spoken French

Although the standard French norm prescribes that negation is marked twice in the verb phrase (ne…pas), contemporary usage prefers to drop the first element (ne) in Spoken French. In a 1981 article based on a corpus of Spoken French recorded in Tours in 1976, Ashby brought to light a significant co-variation/correlation between ne loss and speaker age: younger speakers dropped ne much more often than older speakers. This distribution seems to stem from a change in apparent time. However, as Labo