Use of empêcher

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Permalink Reply by Vedas on June 9, 2013 at 2:04pm

Hello,

Cela n'empêche/ il n'empêche que are rather link phrases and express an observation , a statement of fact which can be translated by still/nonetheless/the fact remains...

This use of ne is called "explétif" by grammarians, we can use it when we feel a sense of doubt or negation, mind you it's not like an objective negation.

What is interesting is that it could be used without ne and grammarians have argued a lot about using it or not.

-tout cela n'empêche pas que je n'aie faim

-Il empêche, s'il n'est pas effacé, que la transformation active ne s'effectue.

-Mais la main empêchait qu'on vît la bague.

when il is impersonnal one shouldn't use ne : il empêche que les français ont tendance à.....

but I think that today most people would say il n'empêche que which doesn't affect the meaning at all, it's just a stylistic question.

"cela ne les empêche pas d'avoir une tendance à prendre leur voitures". is correct !

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Permalink Reply by Tryphon Tournesol on June 9, 2013 at 2:11pm

merci beaucoup :)

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on June 9, 2013 at 5:53pm

There are a number of interesting points here that I think are worth expanding on. But essentially, for partly historical reasons, there are what you can see as four types of 'negative':

(1) The normal negative in standard modern French, ne ... pas, ne ... que, ne ... personne etc, where the words that carry the actual negative meaning are pas etc, but the ne is a kind of 'introductory particle';

(2) The negative in informal French, consisting of just pas etc.

(3) The use of ne on its own to indicate an actual negative. This is nowadays an archaic construction but occasionally found under some circumstances.

(4) The use of ne on its own under certain syntactic circumstances simply to 'fill out the sentence/syntax' even though it arguably doesn't indicate negation or any other particular meaning. This is the so-called expletive ne.

Recall that a negative such as ne...pas is historically dervied from pas having its meaning of 'step', 'pace', so that once upon a time Je ne marche pas would have been interpreted as something like "I will not walk a single step", and that the "main" negative marker was ne, and up until at least the 1200s[*] it was fairly normal for ne on its own to mark a negative.

[*] According to one estimate given by Price, 25%-30% of negatives around that time were of the 'complex' type with a noun like pas, point, mie, goutte etc.

So, to cut a very long and complicated story short, the current situation is that:

- (3), i.e. using just ne as a negative, is a hang-over from the historic situation. In Old French, ne on its own was possibly more common under certain syntactic circumstances (e.g. in subordinate clauses). What appears to have happened is that around the 1600s, those commenting on the language began to try and formalise more concretely a preference for keeping ne on its own under circumstances (e.g. some preferred it with pouvoir, savoir, vouloir, others with certain other verbs, some with the conditional si etc). The situation you have today is then that a few of these arbitrary preferences have stuck in the formal/literary usage of some authors. There is no single universally agreed upon list of the exact circumstances when ne on its own is used as a negative (because there never was such a list in the first place: different grammarians have always given a different opinion). But candidates include certain uses of the modal verbs (e.g. the literary expression Il ne saurait être vrai que... would almost always be used with just ne, whereas the equivalent in everyday French Il ne pourrait pas être vrai que... would only be grammatical with pas.) Now, it turns out that one expression that has survived with ne on its own as a negative is Il n'empêche que...

- Case (4) arises because as early as the 1100s/1200s (and earlier), while the negative generally could still be ne on its own, people inserted a negative in some cases where they seem to have felt that 'one ought to be expressed'. For example, if I say "She is fresher than a rose is", there is a sense that I am saying "She is fresh, whereas a rose is not as fresh". And so, people would say essentially the equivalent of Elle est plus fraîche que n'est une rose. Nowadays, this sounds antiquated in French (you would just say Elle est plus fraîche qu'une rose), but you do still get cases such as: Il est plus grand qu'il ne paraît ("He's taller than he looks") in modern French.

This also extended to a few other cases where people 'felt that there ought to be some negativity expressed' but where syntactically there was no negative, so ne was arbitrarily inserted. (At least, that's one way of looking at what happened!) Typical cases that have survived into French are subordinate clauses headed by certain verbs or prepositions, including craindre que.../avoir peur que...., avant que... and... empêcher is also one of such verbs!

So, this means that empêcher is actually a complex case because it can be used with ne alone either as case (3) or as case (4). As an example of Case 3, the expression Il n'empêche que... survives, essentially meaning Cela n'empêche pas que..., Il reste vrai que.... And in addition, after empêcher with its general meaning, ne can optionally be inserted. So, "that will prevent him from coming" could be either Cela empêchera qu'il vienne or Cela empêchera qu'il ne vienne. This is the "expletive" use of ne, that essentially carries no logical negative as such, but perhaps expresses the 'felt' negative that "if you're preventing them from doing something, then there ought to be a negative somewhere".

Now... if you're thinking this all sounds a bit complicated, that's because it is. Needless to say, what I'm talking about are certain literary conventions invented by some commentators over the years, and followed by some, but not all, writers, with a number of variations existing due to differences of opinion between those trying to lay down the convention plus evolution in preferences over the course of time.

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Permalink Reply by Tryphon Tournesol on June 10, 2013 at 1:58am

Thanks.  It's always comforting to know that grammarians had been arguing over something that I'd found confusing :)

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