From Latin to modern Italian: diachrony of phrasal negation

This work focuses on a particular diachronic transformation of a syntactic category, that is the propositional negation. I consider a time span ranging from archaic Latin to modern Italian, passing through the ancient forms of medieval documents. I will show that some negative phenomena endured in different diachronic transformations, while others changed over time, confirming generalizations such as those formalized as espersen's cycle. rom this point of view, the change in the syntactic nature of the Latin negative morpheme n An was crucial: it started as a maximal pro ection and it became a head. This change caused the multiple negation constructions that still occur in Italian. inally, I will also discuss some negative phenomena occurring in odern Italian, which are not well studied.