Entre la cuantificación y la negación: Los minimizadores y su papel en la negación enfática en asturiano

Abstract

The expression of emphatic negation in Romance languages is a phenomenon of syntactic microvariation in which the origin of postverbal negative markers (minimizers or quantifiers) constrains their syntactic behavior and the pragmatic interpretation of a sentence. The coexistence of many syntactic structures with minimizers in modern Asturian allows us to reconstruct the grammaticalization process these items have undergone in becoming quantifiers and postverbal negative markers. Although this process is similar to the one that has taken place in other languages, the results of grammaticalization are different, due to the grammatical constraints of each language.

Keywords

• minimizers
• quantification
• emphatic negation
• grammaticalization
• Asturian.