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The purpose of this paper is to study the failed grammaticalization of the noun phrase nul homme (Eng. «no man/nobody») in Medieval French. Having a considerable frequency in Old French (12th–13th century) which declined by the end of the Medieval period, nul homme showed a tendency for grammaticalization towards a negative indefinite pronoun. Nevertheless, in later stages of the French language evolution, the grammaticalized use did not prevail. The paper represents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of nul homme occurrences in the BFM19 corpus (9th–15th century) that takes in account the text-type distribution and the verse/prose opposition. Based on the model by Giacalone-Ramat/Sansò, it follows different stages of grammaticalization of nul homme in Medieval French before suggesting a multifactorial explanation of its later failure such as nul homme’s preference for versified texts and its competition with nul-pronoun.
