Negationspräfixe im heutigen Französisch

Following a discussion of the term 'prefix' and theoretical remarks on 'negation', the author proceeds to an empirical analysis of 1,098 cases of morphological lexematic negation in French. The word formations are studied for their semantic, morphosyntactic and stylistic/expressive functions. The closing section compares the specific functions of negative prefixes thus identified and demonstrates that prefix selection is determined by such features as structural type or designation class of the base lexeme, morphosyntactic properties of prefix formation, and special-language marking.