Hi,
When do you drop the “pas” in French? Or when is “pas” not required in French?
I know the French often drop “ne” in conversational French. When do they not use “pas” in formal French/informal French. I don’t see any “pas” following “jamais” or “personne”. That I understand.
But what about “Personnel ne voulait de son projet de film” ?
Why “Je ne gagne pas plus” but “La police n’intervient plus” ?
I look forward to your feedback.
Adding a “pas” would make it a double negative : “Nobody didn’t want his film”.
Yes, I know, “ne” is technically a negative preposition, and typically paired with a “pas”, but here it’s a… I don’t know what the grammatical term would be, a transparent one ? You could remove it in casual speech, pretty much. “Personne voulait de son projet de film” is an equivalent, albeit more casual, sentence.
But you couldn’t say “Personne ne voulait pas de son projet de film”. Except as a deliberate stylistic play on grammar, to mean that everybody loved it and wanted to have it, I suppose. But it’d be weird.
Not quite the same meaning. “pas plus” is “not more” (in a quantitative sense), whereas plus is “not anymore” (in a duration/time sense). In “pas plus”, plus is not the negative plus, but the quantitative plus (as opposed to minus). They’re not pronounced the same, either : the negative plus is “plu”, with a silent -s ; the quantitative plus is “pluss”.
Example :
“J’ai beau avoir été promu, je ne gagne pas plus” : even though I got a promotion, I don’t earn a cent more
“J’ai beau m’entraîner, je ne gagne plus” : even though I keep training, I don’t win [at this game] any more.
See the nuance ?
Super answer Kobal2. Merci mille fois!
Forgot to answer the main question :o. The answer is : you don’t, really. You can’t. Any negative sentence must, perforce, have a negative in it - you can drop the “ne” in pretty much all cases when speaking informally, but not the primary negative.
That negative can be “pas”, which indicates that [positive sentence] is not true.
It can be “plus” (“plu”, the negative) to indicate that it used to be true but isn’t any more.
It can be “jamais”, to indicate that not only isn’t it true but it never has been.
It can be “pas toujours”, which is a not-quite-negative : the positive sentence is infrequently true.
You can also construct your sentence with “ne [verb] que [adjective]” (e.g. “il ne vient que rarement”, he doesn’t come often. In this particular case, you can’t drop the “ne”. But then, it’s a fairly formal/literary sentence construction.
I’m sure there are a million others, but I’m out of time 
All of these are mutually exclusive, but you gotta have one for your negative sentence to make sense.
I am being foolhardy getting into this because my French is really awful. But…
With a few exceptions (pouvoir being the one I can think of), to make a negative you have to pair “ne” with another word, I think it’s called a negative correlative. These include “pas”, “point”, “plus”, “jamais”, and “personne”, “que”, each with a different meaning. As Kobal2 explained, you don’t use two of them in the same place.
This leaves the sentence, “je ne gagne pas plus” to be explained. I think the explanation is that the “plus” is not being used as a negative correlative, but in its ordinary meaning of “more”. “I’m not earning more”, while “je ne gagne plus” would mean “I am not earning any more”. So it is essentially the distinction between “more” and “any more”.
There are a small number of constructions where you have the option to just use “ne” without “pas”.
These are formal, and I have never (in my limited experience) heard anyone say these things, but have seen them in novels.
There are three negative structures particular to formal French. While they are not unheard of in spoken French, they are most commonly found in writing, especially literature.
Point is the literary or formal equivalent of pas, thus ne… point is simply the structure used to negate a statement in formal French. Like other formal expressions, you can also use ne… point for humoristic effect.
(further down the page)
…The other two formal negative structures consist of ne without pas or any other negative word. They are the ne explétif and the ne littéraire.
Thank you all. Very helpful.
davidmich
As I understand it, the “ne” is the older part of the construction, with the “pas” or equivalent originally being an intensifier, because the “ne” is hard to hear in fast conversation, and that every verb had its own intensifier, so at the time:
“je ne marche pas” ==> I don’t walk a step
“je ne mange mie” ==> I don’t eat a bite
Eventually, “pas” became the generic negative intensifier for most situations, even if “a step” doesn’t make sense, and the use of an intensifier stopped being optional.
Would the following be correct?
Je ne pagne plus (I no longer earn money)
Now figure out Serge Gainsbourg ’ s song, “Je t’aime moi non plus.” 
Now figure out Serge Gainsbourg ’ s song “Je t’aime moi non plus.”
In fact, no, you need to say “je ne gagne plus rien” or “je ne gagne plus d’argent” otherwise it would be understood as “I don’t win anymore” (gagner meaning both “to earn” and “to win”). I’ve no clue why the “win” meaning…hmm…wins, but it does. Even if the context was perfectly clear, like as an answer to a question about how much you’re making, the sentence would still be incomplete without a “rien”.
It works with other verbs : “je ne mange plus”, “je ne fume plus” (I no longer eat, no longer smoke) are perfectly fine, for instance.
I don’t know French, but I heard lecture by a linguist once who discussed this locution as an example of grammaticalization. That is, as you point out, the pas means a step literally, but was commonly used to modify a negation that it came to have a grammatical function independent of its literal meaning. But, he also said that formally you are supposed to say both parts ne and pas, though informally people drop one or the other and the meaning doesn’t change, unlike the similar case in Latin where you can say nē passum quidem but the meaning changes if you drop a word.
On a tangential note, my small knowledge of this matter informed my appreciation of the French version of the song Big Girls Don’t Cry, translated to (if I’m spelling this correctly) Gros Fils Fleur Pas.
John McWhorter’s Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language devotes quite a bit of time to this as well as other ways that Latin turned into French.
My understanding is that you can, and in informal speech often do, drop the ne. You cannot omit the pas (or other negative), except with a few verbs.
I once asked a Frenchman something and the answer I got back sounded to my ears as “chez pas”. My wife, who is quite fluent explained to me that it was a verbal contraction of “Je ne sais pais”, quite akin to “dunno”. But there was certainly no “n” sound.
To confuse matters further, the ne explétif doesn’t really negate things. That’s more or less why it’s called explétif.
Was the linguist John McWhorter? I grabbed that example from “The Power of Babel”, by him.
I kind of like the idea that French is transitioning from using “ne” as the sole marker of negation, to using “pas”, but that transition is being stalled by the fact that there is enough French literature that everyone knows you “should” have the “ne”. If French was a minor language without a body of literature, the transition would have been complete long ago.
I think you mean “Grosse Filles (ne) Pleure Pas”. What you have is something about sons and flowers (and I think it means “big” as in “fat”, instead of “big” as in “adult”, but I haven’t done French in 10 years, and wasn’t very good at it then either).