I'm interested in a non-canonical use of negation, its "expletive" use or use of negation that seemingly has no semantic value whatsoever. My goal is to explain why - in some languages - negation markers can receive an expletive reading in the scope of a heterogeneous set of context: apprehensive verbs (fear), temporal connectives (before), conditional connectives (unless) and comparative clauses (more/less than). Focusing on French, I adopt a diachronic approach, based on corpus evidence, reconstructing the historic trajectory whereby an expletive reading of negation emerged, from Latin to contemporary French.
