Para a história da negação: o minimizador <i>homem</i> no português antigo

Abstract

By presenting data from texts from the 13th to 16th centuries, this article aims to shed light on the history of negation in Portuguese. We will show that, in addition to negative words, Old Portuguese displayed another set of items that could trigger negative concord: minimizers (Horn, 1989). Unlike languages such as French, none of the Portuguese minimizers completes the Jespersen cycle (Jespersen, 1917), becoming a new post-verbal negative marker.

We will claim that there were two different kinds of minimizers in Old Portuguese, the partitive/evaluative group and the indefinite group. Only the former group survives in contemporary Portuguese, although it is not very productive. The early disappearance of the indefinite minimizers in Portuguese by the end of the 16th century contrasts with the way equivalent items developed in languages such as Italian and French. In an attempt to explain their disappearance, we will considerthe hypothesis of competition between negative words and indefinite minimizers based on the idea of competition between grammars (Kroch, 1989).

We will take as an example the minimizer homem (man) and we will consider the possibility that it might compete with the negative word nenhum (none), showing the similarities and differences between the two. By applying the parameters proposed in Garzonio and Poletto (2008, 2009), we conclude that homem and nenhum were at different stages of the grammaticalization process and that, despite the fact that they could occupy the same syntactic position, other factors need to be taken into account to explain why homem disappeared from the language.