Pronoun clitics and sentential negation in Portuguese: some elements for grammar description

Abstract

In this paper we intend to discuss about the relation between pronoun clitics and sentential negation (NEG) in Portuguese. Wherefore we resume some issues about the Portuguese syntax history trying to find clues that help us understand the nature of the Portuguese NEG-operator (the word não) and the syntactic changes that affected clitic placement over time and in the language migration from the European to the American space. We are going to show that não has a different nature as compared to others adverbs, even other negatives, because, unlike other adverbs, nothing except a clitic pronoun appears breaking the contiguity between não and the verb, from the old to the current Portuguese variants in Europe and America. Among other facts, the ability to license ellipses in coordinated clause and the relationship between não and clitics, amongst não and the undefined negative words, form some of the arguments to defend a hypothesis in favor of the structure where a functional head with polar traces (negation and affirmation) dominates the inflectional categories of the verb. As regards the syntactic differences noticed in NEG and clitic relationship over time and space, we argue that these are related to the nature of the preverbal position and to the different possibilities of clitic climbing in the history of Portuguese. As regards the difference between European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), we argue that the clitic in BP is associated with the lexical verb, not with a functional head of verbal inflection, as seems to be the case in EP