No lo he visto ‘masque’ yo?

Abstract

This paper shows that Spanish ‘más que’ (lit. more than) is much more than a comparative construction synchronically. Phonological, syntactic, and semantic evidence shows that various grammatically different entities hide under this single spelling. The most prominent of these is a (phonologically unstressed) negative polarity item with a meaning “only” or “just”. By means of robust synchronic and diachronic corpus evidence, this paper explores its morphosyntactic properties and geographic distribution in the modern language, as well as when and how a comparative expression with no polarity associations could come to grammaticalize into a negative polarity item.

Keywords

• Spanish
• negative polarity
• corpus
• grammaticalization