4 - Sentential negation: clitics

Summary

Many Romance languages have a negative clitic which stands alone (for instance standard Italian) or is doubled by a negative clitic (for instance French). Since Pollock (1989) these have been modelled by a NegP projection in which the negative clitic and the negative adverb occupy the head and Spec position respectively. According to Zanuttini (1997), who extends this model to Italian dialectal variation, languages which require a sentential negation adverb generate it in one of the lower Neg positions; if a clitic combines with the adverb, it is generated in the head of the relevant Neg position and moves to the inflectional domain by cliticization. By contrast, negative clitics in languages like Italian which do not require a sentential negation adverb are hosted by a Neg position generated above I, Neg₁.

In other words, for Zanuttini (1997) preverbal clitic negations are associated with two different structures, according to whether they stand alone or combine with a negative adverb. Moreover, she detects a correlation between these structures and the ordering of the negative clitic with respect to subject clitics in languages that have both of them. In her terms Neg₁, hence the standalone negative clitic, will precede inflected subject clitics, though it may follow vocalic uninflected subject clitics. Counterexamples to this generalization are Tuscan varieties in which the standalone negative clitic precedes 1st/2nd person subject clitics but follows 3rd person ones (cf. Càsola in (7) below).