Negative Indefinites in the history of Portuguese : the case of <em>nemigalha</em>

Abstract

This paper focuses on negative indefinites in Portuguese, paying particular attention to nemigalha, a negative indefinite that disappeared from the language around the 16th century. We claim that nemigalha originates from the reanalysis of the negative particle nem and the minimizer migalha in an early stage of the language, starting as a weak negative polarity item and then becoming a strong negative polarity item, in the sense of Martins (1997, 2000). It is well known that minimizers can grammaticalize into intrinsically negative items, being good candidates to undergo the Jespersen Cycle (Jespersen 1917). Although that was not the case of nemigalha, it completed all the grammaticalization stages proposed by Garzonio & Poletto (2008, 2009), losing all the properties of a common noun and being able to stand alone as the only negative marker in preverbal position. The comparison between nemigalha and the negative indefinite nada shows that both items exhibited similar behaviour and occurred in identical contexts, probably acting as competing items until nemigalha’s disappearance. Furthermore, a few examples from the 16th century suggest that nemigalha might have become a more functional item, participating as a negation marker in presuppositional contexts (cf. Larrivée 2010 and Hansen 2013).