From Latin to Modern Italian: Some Notes on Negation

Abstract

This article aims at investigating some diachronic aspects of the Italian negative system, considering a time span ranging from Old Latin to Modern Italian. Most of the negative polarity phenomena populating the Modern Italian system are consequences of a crucial change that occurred in Old Latin: The Latin negative morpheme nōn (“not”), which initially displayed a maximal projection status, and became a syntactic (negative) head. This change caused the shift from a double negation system to a negative concord one, which affects many Romance languages (and their dialects). It also determines the availability of the expletive reading of negation in Italian, as well as in other Romance languages (ex. French), calling for a new generalization: only languages (and structures) displaying a negative head allow the expletive interpretation of negation, languages displaying a maximal projection status do not.

1. Introduction

This article aims at investigating some diachronic aspects of the Italian negative system, considering a time span ranging from Old Latin to Modern Italian.

Negation characterizes all and only human languages (Horn 1989; Speranza and Horn 2012; Greco 2020b) and it represents a one-place operator reversing the truth-value conditions of the sentence in which it occurs. Consider, for example, the following declarative sentences:

(1)	a.	The situation is under control.
	b.	The situation is not under control.

The sentence in (1b) is true if and only if the sentence in (1a) is false, and vice versa. However, this definition just holds for some types of clauses, such as declarative clauses, since they have truth-value conditions, but not, for example, for interrogatives and exclamatives that do not have them. For this reason, I will consider negation as a complement-set operator (see Delfitto and Fiorin 2014 and the references therein) in order to take into account the complexity of the data and other kinds of sentential negation (among others, see Krifka 2010; Delfitto 2013).

Crucially, Latin and Italian are often taken as instances of two very different negative systems—although Italian comes from Latin—respectively, a double negation system (1a)—where the co-occurrence of two negative elements generates an affirmative meaning—and a negative concord one (1b)—where the co-occurrence of two, or more, negative elements constitute a single instance of negation:

(2)	a.	nemo	nōn	videt	(Cic., Lael. 99.6)
		nobody	not	sees
		‘Everyone sees’
	b.	Non	vede	nessuno
		not	sees	nobody
		‘Nobody sees’

In line with part of the literature (see below), I will show that this classification is incorrect, since Latin also displays some examples of negative concord constructions. I will propose that this phenomenon depends on a crucial change that occurred in the syntactic status of the Latin negative morpheme nōn (“not”), which initially displayed a maximal projection status, but it became a syntactic (negative) head over time. This was the result of changes that responded to generalizations, such as those formalized as Jespersen’s Cycle and Spec-to-head principle/Head Preference Principle. Crucially, this change occurred in the earliest attestations of Latin (I-III century BC), particularly in texts reporting examples of “lower class” Latin—a stylistic variant typical of the not-educated classes, such as the letters of the soldier Claudius Terentianus (1st century BC) and in texts reporting examples of colloquial Latin—a register that educated classes used in non-formal contexts and was well represented by Cicero’s letters and Plautian’s comedies.

The shift from a maximal projection status to a head one had some crucial consequences, such as the availability of the expletive reading of negation in Old and Modern Italian (3a–b), as well as in other Romance languages (ex. French):

(3)

a.

et

non

è

da

fidare

in

loro

infin

che

non

and

neg

is

to

to.trust

in

them

until

that

expletive.negation

son

connosciuti;

(De amore, L.II, 1287–88. In Faleri 2009, p. 199)

be.3rdPl.

known

‘… and do not trust them until they have been well known’

b.

Rimarrò

qui

finché

non

arriva

Gianni

stay.1stsg.fut

here

until

expletive.negation

comes

John

‘I will stay here until John comes’

Both in (3a) and (3b) the temporal subordinate clause should be negative due to the occurrence of the Italian negative morpheme non (‘not’), but it is affirmative, instantiating a case of vacuous—or expletive—negation. Crucially, the availability of this phenomenon seems to rely on the syntactic status of the negative morpheme that is involved, calling for a new generalization:

(4)	Generalization: only languages (and structures) displaying a negative head allow the expletive interpretation of negation, languages displaying a maximal projection status do not.

Moreover, I will show that expletive negation—which is commonly considered to be a unitary phenomenon cross-linguistically codified—consists of distinct subtypes and I will discuss a twofold partition between weak and strong expletive negation sentences based on the behavior with some neg-words and negative polarity items.

This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 I will first address some fundamental questions on the Latin negative system, focusing on the most widespread negative morpheme nōn (“not”) (Section 2.1). I will then show the occurrence of some negative concord structures (Section 2.2), proposing that the change in the nōn syntactic status (Section 2.3)—from a maximal projection status to a head one—caused them. In Section 3 I will offer a dissertation on negation in Old Italian (Section 3.1), focusing on the Tuscan language (Section 3.1), from which Modern Italian was born. I will also consider some of the first attestation of expletive negation (Section 3.2). Finally, I will discuss the negative system in Modern Italian, starting from some phenomena inherited from Old Italian (Section 4.1). I will then show some innovation in Modern Italian, at least with respect to expletive negation (Section 4.2), discussing a twofold partition within it and some consequences (Section 4.3). I will then finish the paper with some concluding remarks in Section 5.

2. Negation in the Latin System

The constellation of negative phenomena affecting human languages is very rich and ample. For example, negation can range over the entire sentence, as well as over a singular constituent:

(5)	a.	Non erit profecto tibi, quod scribo, hoc novum	(Cic. De Orat. 3.1)
		‘What I write will certainly not be new to you’
	b.	Agri reliquit ei non-magnum modum …	(Plaut. Aul. 13–14)
		‘He lefted him a not-big piece of land’

In this work, greater attention will be paid to the typology in (a), the sentential negation, and different syntactic structures will be considered.

2.1. A Complex Negative System

Latin displayed two sentential negative morphemes, nōn and nē1 (Ernout and Thomas 1953, pp. 148–49); the former was originally reserved to constative sentences and the latter to the non-constative ones, such as performative, prohibitive, optative clauses, etc. The morpheme nē also instantiated a case of complementizer in clauses introduced by verba timendi (ex. timeo ne)2. A further negative element was represented by haud3. However, its attestation was very limited compared to the previous forms and it was restricted to some syntactic contexts, for example, with adverbs and adjectives (ex. haud facile, let. ‘not easy’) and, only rarely, with verbs (Plaut. Amph. 185: Facit ille quod volgo haud solent, Eng. ‘He does what people usually do not’)4. However, haud and nē were replaced by nōn already in the early stages of Latin, becoming the most widespread negative marker. This is the reason why I will focus on it in this paper, leaving aside the other negative markers5.

The morpheme nōn is a complex element deriving from nē (‘not’) + oinom (lat. ūnus, ‘one’) (Ernout and Meillet 1959, p. 444; de Vaan 2008; Fruyt 2011), still recognizable in the ancient form noenum (Plaut. Aul. 67). Its derivation perfectly fits into the common evolution of negative elements, as proposed by Jespersen (1917) (“Jespersen’s Cycle”)6: the original negative morpheme nē has been joined to a second element with a reinforcing value, in this case a numeral pronoun. At first it was exclusively dedicated to the indicative and the infinitive mode7, however, since the Imperial age, it has progressively replaced the form nē, so much so as to lead some grammarians to report the mistake (Quint. inst. 1, 5, 50: Qui tamen dicat pro illo ‘nē feceris’ ‘non feceris’, in idem incidat vitium, Eng. ‘However, anyone who says ‘non feceris’, instead of ‘nē feceris’ ‘don’t do it’, would fall into the same mistake’). It is worth knowing that nōn tended to build compounds, such as nōn-ne, an interrogative particle presupposing an affirmative answer. More examples are in nōn-nihil, nōn-numquam, and nōn-nemo, where two negative items give an affirmative meaning, respectively “something”, “sometimes” and “someone”. This particular propensity of nōn to form compounds will be very important for its definitive syntactic classification, and it will be addressed in Section 2.3.

Another form of sentential negation is the use in isolation of negative pronouns, adjectives, and indefinite adverbs, such as nemo (‘nobody’), nusquam (‘nowhere’), nullus (‘not any’), ecc. (es. Enn. trag. 22 R3.: Nemo est tam firmo ingenio “No one is so resolute in spirit”). These negative objects do not require any kind of restriction in the choice of the verbal mode. Again, they became a form of sentential negation through a series of transformations that are well represented by Jespersen’s Cycle. Quoting Ernout and Thomas’s (1953, p. 153) words, «Il arrivait à ces formes de perdre leur sens propre pour servir de négations fortes, surtout dans la langue parlée et en poesie». Consider, for instance, the derivation of nullus, which is formed by nĕ and ullus (<oinolom; Eng. ‘any’) (Orlandini and Poccetti 2012): this process is often at the basis of the creation of negative polarity items (NPI), which are conserved in many Romance languages. We already saw that Latin shows these kinds of changes, as in nōn, but this passage has remained visible in the case of the negative indefinites, as some ancient texts show:

(6)

a.

Non

ante

tibi

ullus

placebit

locus

(Sen. Epist. 28, 2)

not

before

to.you

any

like.FUT.2ndsg.

place

‘Before (that), you will like no place’

b.

Nullus

placet

exitus

(Iuv. 6, 33)

not any

like.3th.s

death

‘No kind of death is appealing’

The so-called minimizers represented a similar form of sentential negation. Those are lexical items denoting small measures and quantities, that were used to strengthen the negative interpretation of a sentence. Consider, for instance, nihil (‘noting’), where the negative morpheme nĕ is associated with an element indicating a minimum quantity, hīlum, technically the “thread” of green beans (de Vaan 2008; Orlandini and Poccetti 2012) (ex. “nihil est quod timeas”, ‘you have nothing to fear’ Plaut. Amph. 1132).

Crucially, the negative elements—regardless of their category, i.e., negative morpheme, NPI, etc.—showed two constant behaviors: they usually preceded the verb in the word sequence8 and they instantiated a case of double negation—two negation yield an affirmation—when they occur in the same sentence:

(7)

a.

nemo

non

videt

(Cic., Lael. 99.6)

nobody

not

sees

‘Everyone sees’

b.

quae

res etiam

non

nullam

afferebat

deformitatem

(Nep.17, 8, 1)

this

thing too

not

nothing

carried

deformity

‘this too carried a certain part of deformity’

c.

Nec

non

si

parit

humus

mures,…

(Varr., Rust. 1, 8, 5)9

neg

neg

if

yelds

ground

mice

‘And, moreover, if the ground yelds mice…’

According to Ernout and Thomas (1953), the order of the negative elements also determined their logical interpretation: if the indefinite preceded the negation (nemo non), there was a universal interpretation corresponding to ‘all’ ((ibid., p. 154) ‘affirmation total ou renforcée’), if the negative morpheme preceded the indefinite (non nullam) there was an existential interpretation corresponding to ‘something’ ((ibid, p. 153) ‘affirmation partielle ou restreinte’)10. However, the double negation phenomenon was stable only at the regulatory level, whereas it was not stable at the “language of use” level, thus opening the doors to those syntactic changes that flowed into the Romance languages.

2.2. From Double Negation to Multiple Negation

The scenario described above presents a fairly stable and codified linguistic situation, in which the formation of negative sentences followed well-defined strategies. However, in the earliest attestations of Latin new strategies emerged in the use of the language, imposing changes that the written norm rejected. The linguistic data that will be discussed in this section are, therefore, selected by adopting a precise choice: (i) texts reporting examples of “lower class” Latin—a stylistic variant typical of the not-educated classes, such as the letters of the soldier Claudius Terentianus (1st century BC); (ii) texts reporting examples of colloquial Latin—a register that educated classes used in non-formal contexts and well represented by Cicero’s letters and Plautian’s comedies.

The most important phenomenon emerging in the analysis of “lower class” and colloquial Latin is the phenomenon known as negative concord: the occurrence of multiple negative particles within the same sentence constitutes a single instance of negation11:

(8)

a.

Neque

ego

homines

magis

asinos

and-not

I

human-beings.Acc.

more

donkies.Acc.plu

numquam

vidi

(Plaut., Pseud. 136)

never

saw

‘I’ve never seen any men who were more like donkeys’

b.

Iura

te

non

nociturum

esse

homini

Swear.Imp.2ndSg

you.Acc.

neg

harm.Fut.Part.

to.be

human-beings.Dat.sg

de

hac

re

nemini…

(Plaut. Mil. 1411)

prep.

this.Abl.sg

thing.Abl.sg

nobody.Dat.

‘Swear you won’t harm anyone for this…’

These examples are taken from Plautus, one of the most copious authors in the use of this construct (Molinelli 1988), which can reasonably be attributed to the mimesis of the spoken language—typical of the comedy register. As the sentences (8a) and (8b) show, the negative concord phenomenon was not subject to any kind of restriction associated with the nature of the negative elements: both negative morphemes and indefinites can appear together, as well as conjunctions and complementizers12.

The negative concord phenomenon also occurs in some very old texts, both Italic texts (5a) (3rd century BC)—such as the Aes Rapinum (Pulgram 1978, p. 145)—and Latin texts (5b) (2nd–3rd century BC)—such as a little fragment that has been attributed to Marcius Vates13:

(9)	a.	Ni	ta[g]a	nipis
		Ne	tangat	nequis
		neg	touch.Subj.Pres.3rdsg.
		‘S/he does not touch anyone!’
	b.	ne	ningulus	mederi	queat
		not	nobody	to.heal	can.subj.3rd.Sg
		‘S/he does cannot heal anybody’

Other examples were found in Ennius, Lucilius and Varro, showing that this phenomenon was already common in Old Latin and throughout the time span from the first to the third century B.C. (see Molinelli 1988). Consider now Claudius Terentianus’s letter:

(10)	hic a[ut]em sene aer[e ni]hil fiet neque epistulae commandaticiae nihil valunt nesi si qui sibi aiutaveret (CLaSSES, CEL-I-142-259)
	‘Here nothing will be accomplished without money, and letters of recommendation have no value unless a man helps himself’

In (10) the written language differed very little from the spoken one, showing some new grammatical constructions that were not accepted in literature. Crucially, the Classical Latin was also not immune to the negative concord phenomenon as witnessed by Cicero and Tibullus texts:

(11)	a.	Debebat		Epicrates			nummum		nullum
		owed.3rd.Sg.		Epicrates.Nom			money.Acc.sg.		nothing.Acc.sg.
		nemini		(Cic. Verr. 2.60)
		nobody.Dat.sg.
		‘Epicrates did not owe any money to anybody’
	b.	ne	legat		id	nemo…		(Tib. 3, 13)
		neg	read.Subj.Pres.3rd.Sg.		it	nobody
		‘to avoid the risk that anyone read it….

The fact that Cicero used the negative concord construction was particularly important, since it could not represent a mimesis of the spoken language—as it was for Plautus—but, rather, a rhetorical emphasis that should not sound strange to the audience.

The incidence of the negative concord phenomenon significantly increased during the fourth century A.D., so much so that the grammarian Diomedes overtly criticized it:

(12)	modus soloecismi fit per geminationem abnuendi, ut si dicas ‘numquam nihil peccavi’ cum debeat dici ‘numquam peccavi’, quoniam duae abnutivae unam confirmationem faciunt.
	‘a type of solecism occurs with the negation doubling, that is, it is said “numquam nihil peccavi” intead of “numquam peccavi”, since two negations yield an affirmative meaning’

That a grammarian condemns this mistake testifies its widespread diffusion. Negative concord phenomenon tends to stabilize as a new normative construction, and not just as merely a phenomenon restricted to the language of use. Moreover, other grammarians reported the same kind of mistake, such as Nonius Marcello and Augustine, who attributed it to the Greek influence (see Rönsch 1965, p. 447; Ernout and Thomas 1953, p. 154). An explosion of sources testifying the negative concord diffusion starts from the fifth century AD, where the phenomenon became so pervasive that it lost the status of grammatical mistake (Molinelli 1988).

In summary, the shift from a double negation language to a negative concord one already occurred in Old and Classical Latin, even if it became pervasive only in the first centuries AD. In the next section, I will address a possible explanation for this shift by discussing the syntactic nature of the morpheme nōn, which, as seen above, it is undoubtedly the predominant form of negation.

2.3. The Head Status of the Morpheme Nōn

We saw in the previous sections that the possible interactions of the negative elements within the same sentence are two: (i) double negation constructions, that the grammatical norm prescribed; (ii) negative concord constructions, that the grammatical norm refused, but that the language of use and the colloquial style adopted. In recent literature these different outcomes have been traced back to the syntactic nature of the negative morpheme that is involved. In fact, simplifying the discussion in Zeijlstra (2004, 2008), it can be assumed that if there is a syntactic negative head—which projects the structure of the negative phrase NegP—then negative concord construction occurs14; on the other hand, if there is not a syntactic negative head—and, consequently, there is no a negative phrase NegP—then double negation construction occurs.

Clearly, this leads to a kind of contradiction in the Latin system: nōn should be, at the same time, a negative head instantiating a case of negative concord construction, and a maximum projection, instantiating a case of double negation construction. To account for this anomaly, I will assume Gianollo’s (2016) analysis, according to which the negative morpheme has only acquired a head status over time, as an effect of Jespersen’s Cycle (the following scheme is adapted from Gianollo 2016):

(13)	Stage 1:	simple negative morpheme nē (negative head);
	Stage 2:	reinforced negative morpheme formed by nē + oinom (ūnus) (head + max. projection);
	Stage 3:	new simplified negative morpheme nōn (negative head).

This hypothesis is coherent with a well-known tendency in the diachronic evolution of a language: elements classified as maximum projections often become lexical heads (van Gelderen 2004: Spec-to-head principle/Head Preference Principle)15. This change, and the more general reorganization of the syntactic constructions—such as the transition from the OV order to the VO one (Ledgeway 2012)—probably pushed Latin from being a double negation language, to being a negative concord one. Coherently, this shift in the negative paradigm should have first appeared in the colloquial contexts, while the linguistic norm must have endured much longer. This is precisely what the data reported in Section 2.2 seem to tell us. Crucially, this shift began in a distant period, when the language was still in an old form, as witnessed by the earliest attestations of the third century B.C. (see Section 5).

Another confirmation of the syntactic head status of nōn is its ability to form compounds, as witnessed by non-ne, an interrogative particle presupposing an affirmative answer:

(14)	a.	Nonne hac noctu nostra navis huc ex portu persico venit?	(Plaut. Amph. 404)
		‘Didn’t our ship arrive tonight from Port Persicus?
	b.	Nonne his vestigiis ad caput malefici perveniri solet?	(Cic. S. Rosc. 73, 6)
		‘Is it not the case that one generally arrives to the starting point of a crime by following these traces?’

The adverb nonne derived from the negative morpheme nōn and the clitic -ne, which also appears in other forms, such as num-ne, is an interrogative particle presupposing a negative answer. Assuming the standard hypothesis that clitics are heads and that they can only be joined to other heads (Kayne 1989), it follows that the negative morpheme nōn is a head too. Again, not surprisingly the occurrence of nonne was already attested in classical Latin, mostly in texts reproducing the spoken language—for example, comedies (14a)—and in texts where the rhetorical emphasis could legitimize strategies adopted in colloquial contexts (14b) (Ernout and Meillet 1959).

However, this shift in the syntactic status of nōn should have led to the progressive disappearance of all those phenomena typically associated with the double negation construction. This disappearance actually took place, but only with a certain degree of slowness and, more importantly, some data seem to be incoherent with that. The first discrepancy is the occurrence of nōn in negative questions such as why + negation? According to Merchant (2001), I will assume that only negative elements with a maximum projection status can appear in this kind of question, while negative elements with a head status are excluded16. Consider, for example, Modern English where the negative morpheme ‘not’ can appear in these constructs (Why not?) since it is an adverb (maximum projection), while in Modern Greek the negative morpheme dhen cannot, since it is a negative head (*Giati dhen?, let. “Why not?”)17.

Coming back to the Latin negative morpheme nōn, it actually appeared within the interrogative ‘why’ questions, for example, those introduced by quōr, the original form of cur (“why”):

(15)	Quor non?	(Plaut. Pseud. 318; Ter. Andr. 384)
	‘Why not?’

Sentences such as (15) suggest, at first sight, a contrary conclusion for the head status of the morpheme nōn. However, it should be emphasized that the small number of attestations (five in the whole corpus represented in the Classical Latin Texts. A Resource Prepared by The Packard Humanities Institute) and their occurrence in only two authors do not seem to represent a definitive argument in this debate18. Crucially, this could register that oscillation between stage two and three of the Jespersen’s Cycle, when nōn passed from an adverbial reinforcing element (maximum projection) to a head element.

To sum up, one of the most important shifts in the Latin negative system was the transition from the double negation system to the negative concord one. This was a consequence of the change in the syntactic status of the morpheme nōn, which acquired the status of a negative head as an effect of Jespersen’s Cycle (van Gelderen 2004). The consequences of this change first appeared in the texts reproducing the colloquial language, then they spread over the Latin system. I will show in the next section that the head status of the negative morpheme is what Italian inherited since its origin.

3. Negation in the Old Italian System

The first trend in the diachronic process leading to the Old Italian is the relative simplification of the sentential negative system. In fact, only one negative morpheme survives, becoming ubiquitous in all grammatical structures, i.e., non. This morphological simplification did not reduce the plethora of the negative constructions populating the very rich system of Italian and ancient Romansh dialects19. In this paper I will just focus on the sentential negation, with particular attention to the Tuscan area, from which Modern Italian was born20.

3.1. Sentential Negation in the Tuscan Area

Texts from the Tuscan area are fundamental in order to collect all the linguistic changes that led to Modern Italian21. The centrality of non—and its phono-syntactic variants (ex. nonn in front of a vowel)—is the first fact emerging from the study of the ancient Tuscan documents. This clearly came from Latin, in which nōn substituted all the other negative markers (Section 1). Tuscan dialects also maintained the preverbal position of the negative morpheme, whereas some other Old Italian languages did not22. Consider, among many other documents, one of the earliest attestations of the vernacular Tuscan (twelfth century), i.e., the Laurentian Rhythm:

(16)	non	fue	questo	villano	(v.18. In Castellani 1986, p. 192)
	neg	be.past.3rd.Sg	this	peasant
	‘He were not a low social status man’

Interestingly, Old Tuscan also inherited the negative concord system from Latin, where the negative morpheme non co-occurs with negative indefinites23. These indefinites can realize both adjective and pronominal functions; some examples are “neuno”/“niuno”, (nobody/nothing), “nullo”/“nulla” (no/nothing) and “niente”/“neiente”/“neente” (nothing):

(17)

a.

e

non

fare

neuno

esordio

né

prolago

and

not

to.do

nothing

start

and.not

prologue

di

parole…

(Brunetto Latini, Rettorica, c. 1260–61. In Maggini 1968).

of

words

‘and not doing any prologue of words….’

b.

sì

ch’eo

non

ho

riposo

i(n)

thus

that.I

not

have

rest

in

nullo

lato

(Guido delle Colonne, Rime, v.26, 13th cent. In Contini 1960, pp. 97–110).

no

side

‘so that I do not have rest in any side’

c.

che

la

ventura

non

è

that

the

adventure

not

is

niente

(Andrea da Grosseto, Trattati morali, L. 2, 41: 137. In Selmi 1873, pp. 26–40).

nothing

‘that the adventure is nothing’

Cases of negative concord constructions were very common and certainly they were not limited to any stylistic contexts, as it was in Latin. In fact, they constituted the ‘neutral’ grammatical norm. Crucially, the occurrence of negative concord phenomena also suggests that the Latin nōn has been transmitted to ancient Italian preserving its syntactic head status, a necessary condition in order to achieve this phenomenon. Moreover, the negative indefinites could also anticipate the negative morpheme, reproducing the same alternation affecting Latin:

(18)	nullo	consiglio	non	posso
	no	advice	not	can.1st.Sg
	trovare	(Guido delle Colonne, Rime, v. 34, XIII sec. In Contini 1960, pp. 97–110
	to.find
	‘I cannot find any advice’

Whereas the co-occurrence of negative elements in Latin gives rise to double negation constructions—where the different order of the elements imposes a different semantic interpretation (see Section 3)—in old Tuscan it gives rise to a negative concord phenomenon and the position of the negative indefinites does not affect their semantic interpretation. Moreover, negative indefinite pronouns, adjectives and adverbs could also occur by themselves in a preverbal position, instantiating a case of sentential negation:

(19)	nessuno	aveva	connosciuti	certi
	nobody	had	known	certain
	figliuoli, …	(Brunetto Latini, Rettorica, c. 1260–61. In Maggini 1968)
	sons
	‘Nobody knew a certain kind of sons’

The sentences (17–19) show a kind of continuousness in the occurrence of negative elements in old Tuscan: negative indefinites can occur either in isolation or with the negative marker non, both anticipating it and following it. This seems to challenge the clear partition between strict and non-strict negative concord languages (Giannakidou 1997, 2000; see the note 14)24.

However, negative indefinites could also occur in a postverbal position with no negative marker anticipating them, maintaining an existential interpretation. Consider, for example, the interrogative sentences of the yes/no type (Zanuttini 2010, pp. 576–77)25:

(20)	Come	può	essere,	trovarsi		niuno		in	Melano	che
	how	can	be	to find.himself		nobody		in	Milan	that
	contradicesse				alla		proposta? (Novellino, 20, rr. 16–17)
	contradict.Subj.Imperfect.3rd.Sg.				to-the		proposal
	‘How is it possible to find in Milan anybody who contradicts the proposal?’

Another phenomenon that Old Tuscan inherited from Latin is the use of words indicating small measures and quantities (the so-called minimizers) to reinforce the negative interpretation of the sentence (see the evolution of nihil in Section 1). One of the most widespread words was undoubtedly mica (etym. “crumb”) that was already attested in Latin (mica (m)) (de Vaan 2008, p. 378). Quoting the words of Parry (2013, p. 80), the use of these objects has a “quantificational interpretation by being used idiomatically to express the lowest point on a pragmatic scale, that is, “not even a crumb”26 (see Haspelmath 1997 for the original discussion on the pragmatics of minimizers):

(21)

Le

cose

che

furono,

e

che

son

male

non

lo

the

things

that

were

and

that

are

bad

not

Cl.them

saranno

mica

sempre (Il Tesoro, Brunetto Latini, L.7. 13th cent. In Gaiter 1878).

be.fut.3rd.Sg

mica

always

‘Thing that used to be bad and still are bad will not be forever’

3.2. An Emerging Phenomenon in Old Tuscan

Finally, old Tuscan developed a peculiar case of negation, i.e., Expletive Negation (EN) (see, among many others, Jespersen 1917; Horn 1989, 2010; Yoon 2011; Makri 2013; Greco 2021b), in which the negative marker non does not deny the propositional content of a sentence. According to Zanuttini (2010), there are two contexts in which EN occurs in old Italian: (i) temporal (22a) and comparative (22b) sentences and (ii) subordinate sentences depending on some verbal classes, such as fear, doubt, prevent, forbid, and deny. The negative marker in these contexts is absolutely optional and, in fact, the same sentences could omit it without changing the propositional meaning (22a’–b’):

(22)

a.

...et

non

è

da

fidare

in

loro

infin

che

(non)

and

neg

is

to

to.trust

in

them

until

that

EN

son

connosciuti;

(Albertano da Brescia. De amore, L.II, 1287–88. In Faleri 2009, p. 199)

are

known

‘… and do not trust them until they have been well known’

a’.

… e

durerà

infin

che

basterà

l’umana

and

last.fut.3rd.Sg

until

that

be.enough.Fut.3rd.Sg

the.human

generazione

(Bono Giamboni, Vizi e Virtudi, 38: 1292. In Segre 1968, p. 9)

generation

‘and it will last until the human generation lasts’

b.

E

nel

detto

luogo

di

paradiso

ciascun

anima

and

in.

the said

place

of

heaven

each

soul

riluce

più

che

(non)

fa

il

sole

shine.Pres.3rd.Sg

more

than

EN

does

the

sun

‘and every soul shines more than the Sun in that place of heaven’

(Bono Giamboni, Trattato, 32:15. In Zanuttini 2010, p. 581)

b’.

… e

disse:

sempre

vegghia

più

che

and

said

always

vigil

more

than

tu

dormirai

(Albertano da Brescia, 4 (6): 1268. In Selmi 1873, p. 18).

you

sleep.Fut.2nd.Sg

‘and s/he said: be awake longer than you sleep’

Interestingly enough, EN was available in Latin as well, but in a very limited number of contexts (Mari and Tahar 2020), such as the sentences introduced by verba timendi, and it was mainly realized by the morpheme ne (see Section 1):

(23)	Timeo	ne	aborem	augeam
	Fear.Pres.1st.Sg	neg	work-Acc	increase. Subj.1st.Sg.
	‘I’m afraid that I shall increase my work.’ (Cic, Leg, 1.4, in Mari and Tahar 2020, p. 6).

Old Tuscan was not the only Italian language that inherited EN, since it also occurred in some other Old Italian languages, such as Genoese:

(24)	de	defender	che	li	mercanti	toeschi	no	zeyssen	a Venexia
	to	prevent	that	the	merchants	German	neg	went	to Venice
	‘to prevent the German merchants from going to Venice’ (Proposizioni
	fatte dal Comune di Genova, 24: 24–5, 14th c. In Parry 2013, p. 100).

Crucially, only Old Tuscan developed a complex system of EN and it represents an innovation in comparison to Latin as well as to other Old Italian languages (Greco 2021b). Even though it is not clear the reason why EN develops in a language, I propose that the expletive use of negation depends on the syntactic status of the negative element: only syntactic heads implement the EN phenomenon and, crucially, Tuscan ‘non’ is a head—as witnessed by the rich occurrence of negative concord phenomena.

In order to evaluate this idea, consider, for instance, the case of the Modern French (Muller 1978; Makri 2013) and of the Late Middle English (van der Wurff 1999). Both languages display two negative elements, one with the head status and one with the maximal projection status, but only the former instantiates the EN structure:

(25)

a.

Je

ne

nie

pas

[que

je

η’aie

ètè

bien

reçu] (Muller 1978)

I

neg

deny

neg

that

I

EN.have

been

well

received

‘I do not deny that I was received well

b.

I

drede

not

pat

ne

pe

curs

of

God

[...]wolde

I

doubt

not

that

EN

the

curse

of

God

[...]would

brynge

me

into

a

ful

yitel eende

if I

contynuedepus

bring

me

into

a

very

evil end

if I

continued.thus

‘I do not doubt that God’s curse would bring me to a very evil end if I continued like this’ (Testimony of William Thorpe 482. In van der Wurff 1999)

As it is well known (Kayne 1989; Pollock 1989; Zanuttini 1997), the French morphemes ne and pas constitute a single instance of negation by being generated in the same NegP: pas in (Spec, NegP) and ne in Neg⁰. Crucially, EN in the subordinate clause ‘je η’ai ètè bien reçu’ only displays the negative head ne, excluding the element with the maximal projection status pas. Similarly, the Late Middle English sentence displays two negative markers syntactically different: the adverb not with a maximal projection status, and the negative marker ne with a head status. Again, only ne realizes EN. All these facts seem to suggest that the syntactic nature of a negative operator is the key feature that allows EN, suggesting a new generalization:

(26)	only languages (and structures) displaying a negative head allow the expletive interpretation of negation, languages without negative heads do not.

This generalization moves in the same direction of Zeijlstra’s (2011) observation that “there is no language without Negative Concord that exhibits a negative marker that is a syntactic head” (p. 136). From this point of view, two apparently distinct phenomena, i.e., negative concord and EN, seem to be the reflex of a single parameter: the syntactic nature of a negative element. Crucially, old Tuscan inherited the negative marker non from Latin, which displays a head status, and it shows both the phenomena: the negative concord and the expletive negation constructions. In Section 4.3, I will attempt a possible explanation for the EN phenomenon.

To summarize, we saw in this section that many phenomena affecting the sentential negation in Old Italian are inherited from Latin: the head status of non and its (fixed) preverbal position, the negative concord phenomena—that was not limited to any stylistic contexts, as it was in Latin, the use of negative indefinites in isolation; and the use of minimizers to reinforce the negative interpretation of a sentence. On the other hand, some other phenomena were peculiar with Old Tuscan, for instance, the expletive use of negation and the disappearance of all the double negation phenomena. I show that these two facts are just the consequence of the head status of non, which started in Latin, but it reached its conclusion in Old Italian.

4. Negation in the Modern Italian System

We have now reached the last step in the historical evolution of negation. Modern Italian preserves many phenomena coming from the old Tuscan; however, it also displays some innovations. Some of them are consistent with the canonical evolution described by Jespersen’s Cycle, some others are not.

4.1. The Old Italian Inheritance

The first phenomenon that Modern Italian inherited from the old forms is the exclusive use of the negative morpheme non. As in the Old Tuscan, negation always occurs before the inflected verb and no element, but clitics can occur between them27:

(27)	I	ragazzi	non	lo	sanno
	the	guys	neg	Cl.it	know.Pres.3rd.Plu
	‘The boys don’t know’

According to Zanuttini (1997), I assume that the position occupied by non is the highest one that a negative morpheme can occupy within a sentence in Romance languages28.

Another phenomenon that Modern Italian inherited from Old Italian is the negative concord constructions, which represent the linguistic norm. This definitively confirms the syntactic nature of non as a negative head29:

(28)	a.	Non	ha	dato	niente	a	Luca.
		neg	has	given	nothing	to	Luke
		‘S/he gave nothing to Luke’
	b.	Nessuno	ha	visto	niente.
		nobody	has	seen	nothing
		‘Nobody saw anything’

As the sentence (b) shows, a second strategy to deny a sentence is by means of the negative indefinite pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Again, this possibility depends on the position of the negative indefinites30, which can deny the sentence only if it precedes the inflected verb, as the Old Tuscan did:

(29)	a.	*Ha	visto	niente.
		has	seen	nothing
	b.	*Ha	chiamato	nessuno.
		has	called	nobody

However, Modern Italian loses some of the possibilities that were available both in its ancient forms and in Latin. For example, a negative indefinite cannot anticipate negation without making the sentence ungrammatical31:

(30)	a.	*Nessuno	non	ha	visto	il	film.
		nobody	neg	has	watched	the	movie
	b.	*Niente	non	ha	visto
		nothing	neg	has	watched

Modern Italian can therefore be considered a negative concord language of the non-strict type (Giannakidou 2000; see note 14).

The similarities with the Old Italian system do not stop there. Even in Modern Italian, negative indefinites can appear in a postverbal position, with no negative element anticipating them and maintaining—as in the first documents of Tuscan area—an existential interpretation, such as in yes/no questions32:

(31)	Ha	chiamato	nessuno	per	me?
	has	phoned	nobody	for	me
	‘Did someone phone me?’

Moreover, Modern Italian also replicates the behavior of Old Italian when it reinforces the negative meaning of a sentence thanks to minimizers and polarity items. The most common expressions are affatto (‘at all’), mica (etym. ‘crumb’), idiomatic expressions such as alzare un dito (‘lift a finger’), and some profanities such as cavolo/cazzo (lit. ‘cabbage’/‘dick’):

(32)	a.	Non	l’ha	affatto/mica	visto.
		neg	CL.it.has	at all/neg	seen
		‘S/he did not see at all’
	b.	Non	ha	alzato	un	dito	per	aiutar-mi.
		neg	has	lifted	a	finger	to	help-me
		‘S/he did not lift a finger to help me’
	c.	Non	ha	visto	un	cavolo/cazzo.
		neg	has	seen	a	nothing/nothing
		‘S/he did not see anything’

I recall that mica was already used in Latin (Orlandini and Poccetti 2012) and it spans all the centuries up to modern use, in which it can even appear in a preverbal position, negating a sentence by itself (Mica l’ha visto! Let. mica CL.it.has seen; ‘S/he did not see at all!’). This kind of reorganization from a reinforced element to a sentential negative one is compatible with stage three of Jespersen’ Cycle. However, it should be noted that mica also adds a pragmatic nuance that lacks in the use of non and, therefore, these two elements are not completely interchangeable33. Moreover, mica seems unable to license neg-words in its scope—contrary to what standard negation usually does—challenging the regular outcome of the stage three of Jespersen’ Cycle34:

(33)	a.	*Mica	ha	mangiato	niente
		mica	has	eaten	nothing
	b.	Non	ha	mangiato	niente
		neg	has	eaten	noting
		‘S/he has not eaten enithing’

4.2. A Notable Innovation

Finally, Modern Italian also inherited another use of negation, i.e., expletive negation. As in Old Italian, temporal and comparative sentences host EN. However, Modern Italian also shows many new contexts in which EN can appear. They can be both subordinate and root clauses (see Greco (2019, 2020b) and the references therein for the grammaticality judgments). Starting from the subordinate ones, EN can be introduced (i) by a verb as in interrogatives (34a), (ii) by conjunctions such as “piuttosto che” (“rather than”) (34b), “finché” (“until”) (34c), “a meno che” (“unless”) (34d) and “prima che” (“before”) (34e), (iii) by “chissà” (“who knows”) (34f), and (iv) by a comparative35 (34g):

(34)

a.

Paolo

si

chiede

se

Maria

non

abbia

Paul

cl.to himself

wonders

if

Mary

EN

have. Subj.3rd.Sg

mangiato

troppo

(Interrogative clauses)

eaten

too much

‘Paul wonders whether Mary ate too much’

b.

Preferisco

uscire

con

te

piuttosto

che

non

guardare

prefer.Pres.1st.sg

to.go.out

with

you

rather

than

EN

to.watch

la

televisione

da

sola

tutta

sera

the

television

by

alone

all

night

(Rather than-clause)

‘I prefer going out with you rather than watching the television alone all night long’

c.

Rimarrò

qui

finché

non

arriva

Gianni

(Until-clause)

stay.Fut.1st.sg.

here

until

EN

comes

John

‘I will stay here until John comes’

d.

Me

ne

andrò

a meno che

tu

non mangi (Unless-clause)

cl.1st

Cl.

go.away.Fut.1st.Sg.

unless

you

EN eat. Sbjv.2nd.Sg.

‘I will go away unless you eat’

e.

Avverti-la

prima che

non

le

succeda

advise.Imp.2nd.Sg.-cl.her

before

EN

cl.to her

happen.Subj. 3rd.Sg

qualcosa

di

brutto

(Before-clauses)

something

of

bad

‘Let her know before something bad happens to her’

f.

Chissà

che

non

piova!

(who knows–clause)

who-knows

that

EN

rain.Subj.3rd.Sg

‘Who knows whether it will rain!’

g.

Maria

è

più

intelligente

di

quanto

non

sia Carlo (Comp. clause)

Mary

is

more

smart

of

than

EN

be.Subj.3rd.Sg Karl

‘Mary is smarter than Karl

In all these structures negation is expletive and, therefore, it does not reverse the polarity of the proposition (as the English translation shows). Consider now EN in root clauses; it can occur in (v) negative exclamatives (35a); in (vi) negative rhetorical questions (35b); in (vii) not-that clauses (35c); and in (viii) surprise negation sentences (Greco 2020a) (35d):

(35)

a.

Che cosa

non

ha

fatto

Gianni!

(Negative Exclamatives)

what

EN

has

done

John

‘What has John done!’

b.

Dopo

tutto,

che cosa

non

ha

fatto

Gianni

per

after

all

what

EN

has

done

John

for

Maria?

(Rhetorical questions)

Mary

‘What has John done for Mary!’

c.

Maria

non

ha

pianto

che

all’inizio

(Not-that clauses)

Mary

EN

has

cried

that

at the beginning

‘Mary cried but just at the beginning’

d.

E

non

mi

è scesa

dal

treno

and

neg

CL.to me

is got.off

to.the

train

Maria?!

(Surprise Negation Sentences)

Mary

‘That Mary got off the train was a surprise!’

As already anticipated in Section 2.2., it is not clear the reason why a language develops the expletive interpretation of negation, but this surely depends on the head status of the negative morpheme. Crucially, even though the EN in matrix and subordinate clauses realizes a unique phenomenon in which the negative marker does not deny the sentence in which it occurs36, Italian distinguishes two different EN classes showing different syntactic behaviors (Greco 2019, 2020b). Consider the case in which EN co-occurs with a reinforcing element—such as alzare un dito (“lift a finger”; see sentence 32) and with neg-words—as nessuno (‘n-body’)37—in temporal clauses and in exclamatives:

(36)

a.

Rimarrò

alla

festa

finché

Gianni

non

avrà

stay.Fut.1st.Sg

to-the

party

until

John

EN

have.Fut.3rd.Sg

alzato

un

dito

per

aiutar-mi.

lifted

a

finger

to

help-me

‘I will stay at the party until John lift a finger to help me.’

a’.

Rimarrò

alla

festa

finché

non

arriverà

nessuno

stay.Fut.1st.Sg

to-the

party

until

EN

come.fut.3rd.Sg

n-body

ad

aiutar-mi38

to

help-me

‘I will stay at the party until someone comes to help me.’

b.

*Chi

non

ha

alzato

un

dito

per

aiutar-mi!39

who

EN

has

lifted

a

finger

to

help-me

b’.

*Che cosa

non

ha

mangiato

nessuno!

what

EN

has

eaten

n-body

Temporal clauses allow the occurrence of both the reinforcing element (technically, a weak negative polarity item) and the neg-word, whereas exclamatives do not. Starting from distributional and syntactic differences such as this, Greco (2019, 2020b) proposes that EN structures can be either weak or strong depending on whether they maintain some features typically associated with standard negation (for example, allowing weak-NPIs) or not. Applying this label to our example, it follows that until-clauses fall into the weak EN class and exclamatives into the strong one. Crucially, Greco (2019) tested all the EN clauses seen above with regard to several polarity-sensitive elements (weak/strong-NPIs, not-also conjunction, and Neg-words) confirming the twofold classification of ENs (

Table 1. Syntactic constructions with types of EN clauses.

	Weak-NPIs	N-Words
Until-clauses	+	+
Who knows-clauses	+	+
Unless-clauses	+	+
Indirect-interrogatives	+	+
Comparative-clauses	+	+
Negative exclamatives	-	-
Rhetorical questions	-	-
Not…that-clauses	-	-
Rather than-clauses	-	-
Before-clauses	-	-
Surprise negation sentences	-	-

).

4.3. A Small Remark on the Head Status of Non

We saw in Section 2.2 that only languages (and structures) displaying a negative head allow the expletive interpretation of negation, languages without negative heads do not. We also saw that the same kind of head-requirement is mandatory in the distribution of the negative concord phenomenon (Zeijlstra 2011). Interestingly enough, the head status of non also allows it to select different kind of arguments. Of course, the negative head non can select the tense phrase (Belletti 1990; Zanuttini 1997; Poletto 2008), as we saw in (21). Moreover, according to Greco (2020a, 2021a), non can also be merged in the CP-domain (à la Laka 1990)—when the v*P-phase has already been closed—instantiating a case of strong EN40. Consider, among many other examples, the case of exclamatives. Exclamatives show a twofold interpretation: one in which negation is expletive (37a) and one in which it is standard (37b). In Greco’s (2021a) work41 the former was labeled “Expletive Negation Exclamative” (ENE), and the latter “Negative Exclamative” (NE):

(37)	Che cosa	non	ha	mangiato		Gianni!
	what	neg/EN	has	eaten		John
	a. ‘What has John eaten!’						Expletive Negative Exclamative
	b. ‘What has not John eaten!’						Negative Exclamative

The two structures differ grammatically. According to Grimshaw (1979) and Zanuttini and Portner (2003), exclamatives are factive and, therefore, they can only be embedded under factive predicates. However, focusing on a specific sub-class of factive predicates, i.e., to know-verbs, only the NE interpretation is possible, and the ENEs one is ruled out:

(38)

a.

È

incredibile

[che cosa

non

abbia

mangiato

Gianni]!

is

incredible

what

neg/EN

had.Subj.3rd.Sg

eaten

John

‘It is incredible what John did not eat!’

(NE)

‘It is incredible what John ate!’

(ENE)

b.

Luca

sa

[che cosa

non

ha

mangiato

Gianni]!

Luke

knows

what

neg/EN

has

eaten

John

‘Luke knows what John did not eat!’

(NE)

‘#Luke knows what John ate!’

(#ENE)

The expletive reading of negation in (38b) is completely ruled out, whereas the standard one is preserved. According to Greco (2021a), a possible way to take into consideration the differences between NEs and ENEs is to assume a twofold derivation of negation: when the negative marker not is merged in the TP-domain, it gives the standard negation reading, as in a negative exclamative; when it is merged in a higher position, i.e., the CP-domain, it gives the expletive negation reading as in expletive negative exclamatives—(phases are underlined)42.

(39)	a.	[CP … [v*P [X° non ] … ]			(NE)
	b.	[CP … [X° non ] … [v*P…]			(ENE)

Crucially, the high position of negation in ENEs can also explain why they cannot occur under factive predicates, as with to know verbs in (38b). More specifically, it has been proposed (cfr. Grewendorf 2002; Haegeman 2004, 2012) that some factive verbs select a reduced CP, leaving no space for several functional phrases, including, arguably, negation. If this is true, that means that the only available option for negation in exclamatives under to-know verbs is to be in the TP-domain, realizing the standard value of negation as (31b) shows.

Finally, the syntactic schema in (39) also takes into account some differences between weak and strong EN clauses, such as the difference between temporal and exclamative clauses in allowing NPIs and neg-words. I recall that EN in temporal clauses allows them, whereas EN in exclamatives does not (see sentences in (36)). According to (39b), when non is merged in the CP-field in exclamatives, the domain of the vP is impenetrable and, therefore, negation cannot see inside it (see Chomsky 2004, 2008, 2013). From this configuration it follows that ENEs cannot host NPIs and neg-words since, according to Giannakidou (1997) and Zeijlstra (2004), a negative operator must bind all the free variables in the vP domain in order to allow them, and negation in ENEs loses this possibility because it belongs to another phase, namely the CP-phase.

5. Concluding Remarks

This article aims at investigating some diachronic aspects of the Italian negative system, considering a time span ranging from Old Latin to Modern Italian. Most of the negative polarity phenomena populating the Modern Italian system are consequences of a crucial change that occurred in Old Latin: The Latin negative morpheme nōn (“not”), which initially displayed a maximal projection status, became a syntactic (negative) head. This change occurred in the earliest attestations of Latin (I-III century BC), particularly in texts reporting examples of “lower class” Latin—a stylistic variant typical of the not-educated classes, such as the letters of the soldier Claudius Terentianus (1st century BC) and in texts reporting examples of colloquial Latin—a register that educated classes used in non-formal contexts and well represented by Cicero’s letters and Plautian’s comedies. Crucially, the shift from a maximal projection status to a head status also caused the shift from a double negation system—where the co-occurrence of two negative elements generates an affirmative meaning—to a negative concord one—where the co-occurrence of two, or more, negative elements constituted a single instance of negation, which affects many Romance languages (and their dialects). This was the result of those changes that responded to generalizations, such as those formalized as Jespersen’s Cycle and Spec-to-head principle/Head Preference Principle. It also determined the availability of the expletive reading of negation in Old and Modern Italian, as well as in other Romance languages (ex. French), calling for a new generalization: only languages (and structures) displaying a negative head allow the expletive interpretation of negation, languages displaying a maximal projection status do not. Modern Italian also develops two classes of expletive negation sentences, respectively the strong and the weak class. It has also been proposed that the head status of non also allows it to select different kind of arguments, making some predictions on the status of exclamative clauses: when the negative head not is merged in the TP-domain, it gives the standard negation reading as in negative exclamative; when it is merged in a higher position, i.e., the CP-domain, it gives the expletive negation reading as in expletive negative exclamatives.