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Article published In: Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 14:1 (2024) ► pp.1–30

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A diachronic analysis of Spanish alg- series and n- series items in negated clauses

 | Creighton University
Published online: 21 February 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.22032.yam
Abstract
While previous studies have analyzed the changing nature of polarity items (PIs) in Latin (see Gianollo, Chiara. 2018. Indefinites Between Latin and Romance (Vol. 33). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2020. DP-internal Inversion and Negative Polarity: Latin aliquis and its Romance Descendants. Probus 32:2.271–302. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and the licensing conditions of PIs in modern languages (see Homer, Vincent. 2021. Domains of Polarity Items. Journal of Semantics 38:1.1–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), less research has analyzed the diachronic behavior of PIs in the development of the Spanish language. The present study takes a quantitative approach to historical corpus data in showing that in older varieties of Spanish, there was an increased degree of competition between items of the alg- series (i.e., alguno ‘some’) and items of the n- series (i.e., ninguno ‘none’) in negated clauses which later decreased as the language entered its modern age. We find that the competition between these items in negated clauses is influenced by factors such as register, the syntactic role of the PI, and activation status (following Larrivée, Pierre. 2012. Positive Polarity, Negation, Activated Propositions. Linguistics 50:4.869–900. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Larrivee, Pierre. 2017. A Positive Polarity Focus Particle Under Negation. Negation and Contact: With Special Focus on Singapore English ed. by Debra Ziegeler & Zhiming Bao, 63–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). These data provide quantitative support for Martins, Ana Maria. 2000. Polarity Items in Romance: Underspecification and Lexical Change. Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms ed. by Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas & Anthony Warner, 191–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, who suggested that earlier forms of Spanish exhibited more versatile licensing conditions of PIs, and that this variation gradually decreased over time due to a greater salience of the n- series in negated clauses. In total, the present work aims to use corpus data to connect historical linguistic research to theoretical approaches regarding the contemporary usage of PIs.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1The evolution of the Spanish alg- series
    • 2.2The licensing and anti-licensing of PPIs
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Extracting data from CORDE
    • 3.2Experiment 1: Simplex [NEG + V + PI]
    • 3.3Experiment 2: Postnominal alguno
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Experiment 1: Descriptive data
    • 4.2Experiment 1: Regression analysis
    • 4.3Experiment 2: Descriptive data
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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