A Diachronic Study of Negative Polarity in Nominal Phrases

the Case of the Indefinite “Some” in the Formation of IPN [N +algum (Some)]

Abstract

The present paper deals with the posposition of the indefinite “algum” (some) in relation to the noun to instantiate the negative polarity in the nominal phrase in the Portuguese language diachrony, seeking to understand: (i) the nature of the structure [N+algum] in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Portuguese texts, and in nineteenth-century Brazilian texts; and (ii) the process of grammaticalization of the structure as a Negative Polarity Item (IPN, in Portuguese Item de Polaridade Negativa) in the history of the language. It has been found that the structure [N+algum], with inversion, in the 16th and 17th centuries, Classical Portuguese (PCL, in Portuguese Português Clássico), could be used with non-negative value and that other elements could occur in a noun phrase (NP), including the possibility of inflection and non-adjacency between the noun and the indefinite. Such facts supported the hypothesis that in PCL the structure [N+algum] was not grammaticalized as an IPN and the negative value was valued by the presence of a sentential negation operator, preposition or negative conjunction in a higher syntactic domain. It has been concluded that the indefinite in PCL is a determiner (D) even in structures with inversion, these being derived from the movement of the lexical part of the phrase to the specifier position of Determiner Phrase (DP) a fact that contemplates the D properties of “algum” in PCL.