Clause-Final Negation in Brazilian Portuguese.

摘要

My study explores Clause-Final Negation in Brazilian Portuguese, within a Minimalist Program framework. Brazilian Portuguese makes use of three types of sentential negation. In Type 1, the negative marker appears preverbally (i). Type 2 has both a preverbal marker and a clause-final marker (ii). Type 3 has only a clause final negative marker (iii).;i. Eu na&huml;o quero o bolo TYPE 1 1S NEG want.PRS.1S DET cake 'I do not want the cake.' ii. Eu na&huml;o quero o bolo nao TYPE 2 1S NEG want.PRS.1S DET cake NEG 'I do not want the cake.' iii. Eu quero o bolo na&huml;o TYPE 3 1S want.PRS.1SG the cake NEG 'I do not want the cake.';In this work, I analyze preverbal negation as the head of a functional projection NegP within a split IP scenario (Pollock 1989, Costa and Galves 2002). I analyze Clause-Final Negation as resulting from leftward syntactic movement of the whole IP to the specifier of a Topic Phrase which is headed by na&huml;o. Because the IP moves to the left, na&huml;o is clause-final. The movement of IP is motivated by the discourse status of the IP. Following Schwenter (2005), I propose that Clause-Final Negation is only licit when the proposition that it negates is discourse-old---when it is a kind of topic. The movement analysis accounts for both syntactic and semantic/pragmatic restrictions on clause-final negation.