Talk by Sonia Cyrino, More on Negation in Brazilian Portuguese

This Tuesday 1^st November at 14-15.15 (Utrecht time) Sonia Cyrino (University of Campinas) will be presenting a talk entitled ‘More on Negation in Brazilian Portuguese’.

If interested in attending, please contact the RoLinc organizers for the Zoom link.

Abstract: It has been shown in several works (Schwenter 2005, Cavalcante 2007, 2012, Biberauer & Cyrino 2009, Cyrino & Biberauer 2009, Teixeira de Sousa 2015) that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has three positions for the negative marker não in sentential negation (não-V, não-VP-não, and V-não), and they are related to different pragmatic/discourse functions. However, a fourth and reportedly recent position for the negative marker has been noted in the literature about BP (Cyrino 2010, 2013, De Paula 2014): não is possible between an auxiliary and an uninflected verb, that is, in the slot in the structure AUX ___ V[-finite]. In this talk, I advance an analysis for this new position of não in BP. Although syncretic with sentential negation, I show that this negative marker is an instance of constituent negation. Following the nanosyntax approach in DeClercq (2013), I entertain the hypothesis that this fourth não is a Focneg item in contemporary BP, as the result of a diachronic reanalysis. I propose that Focnão has its origin in prefixal não-, with which it is syncretic. It has been detected (Campos 2002, 2009; Pereira 2012) that prefixal não- was rarely used in the 16th century, becoming more frequent in the 20th century. Since contemporary BP has been shown (Cyrino 2010, 2013) to allow certain elements such as clitics and emphatic subjects to occur in the AUX ___ V[-finite] structure, the diachronic reanalysis of the prefixal não- into Focneg might have been facilitated.

Selected references:

Campos, L. S. 2004. A negação prefixal na história da língua portuguesa. PhD Dissertation. Federal University of Bahia.

Campos, L. S. 2009. O desenvolvimento do prefixo não. In: K. Oliveira, H.F. Cunha Souza & J. Soledade (eds). Do português arcaico ao português brasileiro: outras histórias, 247–271. Salvador: EDUFBA.

Cyrino, S. 2010. On complex predicates in Brazilian Portuguese. Ibéria 2(2). Available at:  http://www.siff.us.es/iberia/index.php/ij/index

Cyrino, S. 2013. On AUX+Vparticiple structures and word order. In: D. Moura & M. Sibaldo (eds.) Estudos e pesquisas em Teoria da Gramática, 55–87. Maceió: UFAL.

Cyrino, S. & Biberauer, T. 2009. Appearances are Deceptive: Jespersen’s Cycle from the Perspective of the Romania Nova and Romance-based

DeClercq, K. 2013. A unified syntax of negation. PhD Dissertation, University of Gent.

Teixeira de Sousa, L. 2015. Three types of negation in Brazilian Portuguese. Lingua 159: 27–46.