Post-verbal Negative Sentences in Paraná (Brazil)

Abstract

The paper describes post-verbal negation in the Brazilian Portuguese of Paraná, based on data from the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil Project (ALiB), as part of a broader effort to map sentential negation in dialects in the southern region of Brazil (and later from the midwestern and northern regions) in comparison to northeastern dialects and European Portuguese (EP). The work is justified by the evidence that such negatives have a restricted presence in southern dialects, possibly being much more recent variants in these dialects than in the Northeast and (parts of) the Southeast of the country. The results show an asymmetric geographic distribution of [neg VP neg] and [VP neg] in Paraná, with [VP neg] being absent in several dialects in which [neg VP neg] is already documented. Regarding the grammatical status of these variants, the findings provide that, despite the lower productivity, they are closer to the properties of post-verbal negatives in the Northeast than to those of the EP, as they are available in (polar) questions and in completive embedded sentences instead of being restricted to matrix declarative clauses.

Keywords

• post-verbal negation
• linguistic atlas of brazil
• dialectal syntax