‘Nec’ Discourse Structuring Particle (Latin) Endured in Contemporary Portuguese ‘Nem’

Abstract

Contemporary Portuguese does not have a direct negator for D-quantifiers (*‘Não cada cachorro late’ ‘Not every dog barks’) (Souza, 2017); but a combination of ‘todo’ with ‘nem’, derived from Latin’s ‘nec’ (‘Nem todo cachorro late’/ ‘Not all dogs bark’), apparently yields a universal negation reading (¬∀). However, ‘nem’ is restrained to the very beginning of the sentence (*‘Eu não vi nem todo cachorro correr’ ‘I didn’t see every dog run’), or follows a topic (‘À minha aula, nem todo aluno veio’ ‘To my class, not every student came’) (Peres 2013). Following Gianollo (2020), ‘nem todo’ is analyzed as a discourse structuring particle. ‘Nem’ contains an additive layer over a negation component. It denies the maximization presupposition triggered by the universal quantifier, linking the new information given by the pronounced sentence to previously established contextual information. ‘Nem todo’ instructs the conversation participants to correct their common ground expectations about the participation of the entire nominal domain in the situation. By ‘nem’s distribution in Brazilian Portuguese today and its presence from the XV century to the XXI century, ‘nec’ as a discourse structuring particle did not disappear in romance languages, contrary to Gianollo (2020).