Doubling of postverbal negation and right dislocation

Abstract

This squib deals with cases of apparent doubling of the post-verbal negative marker não in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), documented in data from the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil. The phenomenon brings problems for the description of BP negative sentences, as it suggests the existence of two more sentential negative patterns in BP, i.e. [neg-V-neg-X-neg] and [V-neg-X-neg] (where “X” corresponds to a verbal complement of the type DP, PP or even InfP), in addition to the already widely known patterns [neg-VP], [neg-VP-neg], and [VPneg]. The position of the constituent between the two post-verbal markers can be seen as resulting from right dislocation of the complement phrase, but this analysis still does not account for the phenomenon of doubling the negative marker. The squib shows, however, that the data under discussion can be derived correctly if we see right dislocation as generated not by moving the so called “dislocated” XP within the sentence, but as a result of a juxtaposition structure and sentential ellipse (cf. TANAKA, 2001; OTT; VRIESS, 2016). The apparent doubling of the negation in BP can be seen as an additional argument for analyses that derive right dislocation by sentential juxtaposition and ellipse instead of by rightward movement, by remnant movement or even by base-generation.