Abstract

It has been shown in several works (Schwenter 2005, Cavalcante 2007, 2012, Biberauer & Cyrino 2009, Cyrino & Biberauer 2009, Teixeira de Sousa 2015) that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has three positions for the negative marker não in sentential negation (não-V, não-VP-não, and V-não), and they are related to different pragmatic/discourse functions. However, a fourth and reportedly recent position for the negative marker has been noted in the literature about BP (Cyrino 2010, 2013, De Paula 2014): não is possible between an auxiliary and an uninflected verb, that is, in the slot in the structure AUX _ V[-finite].

In this talk, I advance an analysis for this new position of não in BP. Although syncretic with sentential negation, I show that this negative marker is an instance of constituent negation. Following the nanosyntax approach in DeClercq (2013), I entertain the hypothesis that this fourth não is a Focneg item in contemporary BP, as the result of a diachronic reanalysis. I propose that Focnão has its origin in prefixal não-, with which it is syncretic. It has been detected (Campos 2002, 2009; Pereira 2012) that prefixal não- was rarely used in the 16th century, becoming more frequent in the 20th century. Since contemporary BP has been shown (Cyrino 2010, 2013) to allow certain elements such as clitics and emphatic subjects to occur in the AUX _ V[-finite] structure, the diachronic reanalysis of the prefixal não- into Focneg might have been facilitated.