Italian negation

Italian negates a clause with the preverbal particle non, and nothing else in the clause changes, in any person or tense: canto 'I sing', non canto 'I do not sing'. Object clitics stand between non and the verb. The same non occurs expletively, contributing no negation, under prima che 'before', dubitare 'doubt', appena 'hardly', per poco 'nearly', di quanto 'than', a meno che 'unless', finché 'until' and senza che 'without', the triggers Jin and Koenig record for the language. The colloquial mica, from the Latin minimizer micam 'crumb', co-occurs with non, Gianni non ha mica la macchina 'Gianni hasn't got a car', or replaces it before the verb, Mica fa freddo 'It's not cold'. It is felicitous only when the positive counterpart of the sentence is assumed in the discourse, a presuppositional negative marker in Zanuttini's analysis, and before the verb only when that expectation is the addressee's, as Maiden and Robustelli note; it also occurs in polar questions, as Frana and Rawlins discuss. N-words and the other polarity-sensitive items are entered in Fragments/Romance/Italian/PolarityItems.lean. Miestamo's cantare paradigms are rows of Data.Examples.Miestamo2005.

References

• [Mie05]
• [JK21]
• [Zan97]
• [MR07]
• [FR19]

def Italian.Negation.non : Negation.Marker

non, the standard negator.

Equations

• Italian.Negation.non = { pieces := [[Morphology.Morph.free "non"]] }

def Italian.Negation.standard : List Negation.Marker

The standard negators.

Equations

• Italian.Negation.standard = [Italian.Negation.non]