Chapter published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 127–142

Additive and aspectual anche in Old Italian

| Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main | Goethe-August-Universität Göttingen

In Modern Italian (MI), negative additives (e.g. neanche ‘neither/not even’) contain a negative morpheme ne - and obey negative concord (NC) with sentential negation. In Old Italian (OI), negative additives such as neanche are not attested. Instead, a non-negative additive, anche, combines with a negative marker: e.g. né/non…anche (‘neither/not even’). In OI (i) anche can be used both in negative, and positive contexts; (ii) anche can function either as an aspectual marker (= ‘(not) yet’), or as an additive focalizer (= ‘neither/not even’); (iii) different syntactic positions mirror its different interpretations. We suggest that the grammaticalization of neanche originates from the contexts in which additive anche occurs immediately right adjacent to the negative disjunction né (i.e. né + anche > neanche).

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.(Negative) additives and aspectuals in MI
  • 3.Negative additives in OI
    • 3.1Methods
    • 3.2OI data: positive and negative contexts
    • 3.3OI data: aspectual vs. additive interpretation
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1The syntax of OI anche
      • 4.1.1 Anche as aspectual marker
      • 4.1.2Anche as wide-scope focalizer
    • 4.2Further support: ancora in OI
    • 4.3Rise of the morphological negative additive
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.09fra
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