RED 2017

N-words in Old Italian 

I will present a (quantitative) study of some morphologically N(egative) words in Old Italian, and discuss their Negative Concord (NC) pattern. I will show that the apparent optionality of NC with some postverbal N-words correlate with a proliferation of NC with the same preverbal N-words, at a certain diachronic stage. I connect this behavior to the weak Negative Polarity Item (NPI) status that these N-words acquire during this period, which in turn is related to a change in the NPI licensing mechanism (cf. Chierchia 2006, 2013, Zeijlstra to app.) rather than to NC. (talk delivered by Irene Franco)