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Abstract

Abstract

In European Portuguese, ‘never’ is traditionally classified as a temporal adverb and it can convey sentential negation on its own, therefore behaving as a strong negative polarity item (NPI). Nevertheless, in early stages of the language we find with a non-negative interpretation, in contexts that are considered ungrammatical in contemporary Portuguese. Unlike negative indefinites that started as weak NPIs and became inherently negative, was already a strong negative polarity item in 13th century Portuguese. In this article I will show that, apart from the strong NPI , there was also an ambiguous item that corresponded to a modal polarity item. In the Romance context, items originating from Latin also unfold into ambiguous items with different polarity. In Portuguese, however, ambiguity was not preserved. The evolution of reinforces the idea that Portuguese is the most innovative of Romance languages regarding the outcomes of polarity items.

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2024-12-09
2025-01-20
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: never ; negative polarity items ; Old Portuguese ; temporal n-indefinites
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