SCHWENTER Pragm Neg Braz Port

Lingua 115 (2005) 1427–1456
www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua
The pragmatics of negation in

Brazilian Portuguese$
Scott A. Schwenter*
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University, 266 Cunz Hall,
1841 Millikin Road, Columbus, OH 43210-1229, USA
Received 18 December 2003; received in revised form 16 June 2004; accepted 16 June 2004
Available online 9 September 2004
Abstract
Sentential negation in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has been of considerable theoretical interest in
syntax, semantics, and typology, because of the fact that there exist three different formal possibilities
for expressing negation in this language. However, the conditions under which each form can and
cannot be employed have not been clearly specified in prior research, being characterized instead as
due to intuitive notions like emphasis or poorly-defined applications of concepts such as presupposi-
tion. In this paper, it is shown that these prior analyses are inadequate since they cannot predict the
(non-) occurrence of the different negatives in BP. Using both naturally-occurring and constructed
data, it is demonstrated that there are important pragmatic differences between the three ways of
negating a sentence in BP. These differences are crucially determined by information structure,
specifically the discourse status (old/new) of the proposition being denied. Such a clear interrelation-
$
This paper has had a long—actually, overly long—gestation period after being presented in a much abridged
version at HLS6 in Iowa City (2002). Later in the year it was presented in a Hispanic Linguistics Colloquium at
The Ohio State University. I am grateful to those audiences. There are many individuals to thank for stimulating
comments and critical insight, and I hope this list does not overlook anyone: Marta Albelda Marco, Patrı́cia Matos
Amaral, Luiz Alexandre Mattos do Amaral, Stefan Barme, Flávia Terra Cunha, Ulrich Detges, Tjerk Hagemeijer,
Larry Horn, Jânia Ramos, Susana Rodrı́guez Rosique, Armin Schwegler, Gláucia Silva, Sandra Thompson,
Richard Waltereit, and two anonymous reviewers for Lingua. My biggest thanks go to Gláucia, Alex, and Flávia,
who bravely withstood my onslaught of seemingly pointless questions about negation in BP.
* Tel.: +1 614 292 9588; fax: +1 614 292 7726.
E-mail address: schwenter.1@osu.edu.
0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2004.06.006
1428 S.A. Schwenter / Lingua 115 (2005) 1427–1456
ship between choice of negative form and information structure represents an important contribution
to the study of negation as well as to the field of pragmatics.
# 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Negation; Information Structure; Pragmatics; Brazilian Portuguese
1. Introduction
Across the Romance languages, synchronic and diachronic alternation between two
different formal expressions of sentence (or predicate) negation is frequently encountered.
One of the variants involved in such alternations represents the unmarked canonical form,
the other the marked non-canonical form (for surveys, see Schwegler, 1990, 1996; Bernini
and Ramat, 1996; Zanuttini, 1997). The canonical form is unmarked with respect to the
latter in at least three ways: it typically has a much greater text frequency, a much more
unrestricted functional distribution, and it is structurally simpler than the non-canonical
form. As an example of such a case, in Italian (Cinque, 1991[1976]; Zanuttini, 1997) the
non-canonical form non V mica is rare in discourse in comparison to the canonical and
structurally simpler sentence negation non VP. Non-canonical non V mica also has a much
more restricted distribution than canonical non VP due to its presuppositionally marked
status, as opposed to the non-presuppositional canonical form (Zanuttini, 1997).
In previous work (Schwenter, 2002), I have surveyed two different formal types of non-
canonical negatives in four Romance varieties (Catalan, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and
Dominican Spanish), and argued for a unified pragmatic account of the meaning/function
of these non-canonical negatives. The proposal advanced is that the difference between the
canonical and non-canonical forms is actually rooted in information structure, and in
particular in the discourse status of the proposition being negated by a speaker. This
proposal represents a significant departure away from previous accounts of such alterna-
tions between negative forms, which typically depict the non-canonical negative intuitively
as an emphatic, ‘‘reinforced’’, or presuppositionally-loaded option to its canonical counter-
part. What I offer in this paper is a more precise and predictive analysis, in the form of an
articulated model of information structure, of the constraints on when and where non-
canonical negatives may occur. This analysis, in my view, ought to enable us to actually
provide an explanatory account of where the intuitive insights of previous researchers were
coming from.1
My prior research on this topic (Schwenter, 2002) has therefore looked at the issue of
non-canonical negation from a cross-linguistic perspective, focusing on broad general-
izations across the Romance languages instead of the particular language-specific details of
any one variety. In this paper, I will branch off from that approach and aim more for depth
than breadth, focusing specifically on the interpretation of non-canonical negation in one
Romance variety, Brazilian Portuguese (BP).
In BP, there is a well-known alternation between the three forms in (1) below: (1a)
strictly preverbal negation (a.k.a. NEG1); (1b) ‘‘embracing’’ negation, where the preverbal
1
I am very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for pointing out this interpretation of my own work to me.
S.A. Schwenter / Lingua 115 (2005) 1427–1456 1429
negative is repeated sentence-finally and typically without a preceding pause (NEG2); and,
(1c) less frequently, sentence-final negation in the absence of any preverbal negative
(NEG3):2
(1a) A Cláudia não veio à festa. (NEG1)

(1b) A Cláudia não veio à festa não. (NEG2)
(1c) A Cláudia veio à festa não. (NEG3)
All meaning ‘Cláudia didn’t come to the party.’
As the common gloss for all three sentences implies, there is no difference in the pro-
positional meaning of the three negatives. From a typological perspective, the existence of
three types of sentence negation in BP is quite remarkable, since the vast majority of the
world’s languages normally have only one or at most two of these strategies (cf. Bernini and
Ramat, 1996).3 Schwegler (1991: 190) notes, for instance, that BP is ‘‘the first Romance
tongue which appears to have tolerated a threefold system of verbal negation at any given
stage’’. The system of negation in BP also departs radically from how negation is expressed
in European Portuguese, which relies virtually exclusively on NEG1,4 as in (1a) above.
In this paper, I will be concerned mainly with the pragmatic conditions that separate the
canonical NEG1 form from the non-canonical NEG2 (and, to a lesser extent, NEG3). Like
non-canonical forms in other languages, the meaning or function of NEG2 in BP has been
variously characterized as ‘‘emphatic’’ or ‘‘reinforcing’’ (Uppendahl, 1979), ‘‘contrary to
expectation’’ (Furtado da Cunha, 2001), or ‘‘presuppositional’’ (Schwegler, 1991; Schweg-
ler, 1996; Roncarati, 1996). All of these terms, and the notions that underlie them, are
problematic in one way or another for the analysis of NEG2/3. First of all, emphasis is an
intuitive label that is most typically left undefined by those who employ it, though other
scholars who have not worked on BP negation have in fact given principled definitions of
the concept (e.g. Israel, 1996, 1998, 2004). Barme (2000), for instance, finds emphasis to
be the most convincing explanation for post-verbal não in BP, and supports it by citing the
work of Schwegler (1988, 1990), who, upon surveying the evidence from negatives across
Romance, claims that there is a ‘‘constant and universal psycholinguistic need for negative
emphasizers’’ (1988: 36, cf. also Schwegler, 1990: 158). However, neither Barme nor
Schwegler provides any definition for what is to be understood by the term ‘‘emphasis’’.
Furthermore, Barme’s approval of Schwegler’s (presumed) position is odd, since in another
paper Schwegler (1991) distinguishes NEG2/3 from NEG1 in BP not through the notion of
2
I will not be concerned with the syntactic particulars of the three negatives in this paper. For extensive
syntactic analysis, see Schwegler (1991: 190–200).
3
This assumption follows directly from the diachronic process known as ‘‘Jespersen’s Cycle’’ (cf. Jespersen,
1917), in whose final stage NEG2 structures are supposedly reanalyzed as NEG3 structures due to the
phonological decay of the preverbal negator. French provides the classic example of this process, and spoken
French currently displays a two-way distinction between the NEG2 ‘‘embracing’’ negation of ne V pas, and the
NEG3 form, V pas.
4
The actual frequency of NEG2 in European Portuguese (EP) is a matter of some debate. Tjerk Hagemeijer
(p.c.) reports from Lisbon that NEG2 as in não VP não is fairly common there, though not nearly as frequent as in
BP. Schwegler (1991: 187) states that NEG2 is found in modern European Portuguese ‘‘only . . . in emphatic
sentences’’, and Barme (2002: 191) echoes that position. Clearly more research on NEG2 in EP is needed. NEG3,
on the other hand, has never been attested in European Portuguese, past or present.
emphasis—which he argues is conveyed through intonational highlighting (1991: 193)—

but rather through the presupposition-contradicting pragmatic function of the former forms
as opposed to the presuppositionally-unmarked NEG1 (Schwegler, 1991: 194; also
Roncarati, 1996: 99). To be sure, invoking emphasis as a semantic–pragmatic explanation
is of little use without an accompanying definition, since its intuitive nature makes it
virtually unfalsifiable. As I will show in what follows, the concept of emphasis, whether
poorly- or well-defined (as in Israel’s work, see discussion just below), is neither a
necessary nor a sufficient condition for the employment of NEG2 (or NEG3) in BP.
Relatedly, the characterization of post-verbal forms in non-canonical negative con-
structions like NEG2 in BP as ‘‘reinforcing’’ goes back to Jespersen’s (1917) ground-
breaking work on negation. On this view, the postverbal form is seen as providing extra
phonological weight for the ‘‘weakened’’ preverbal form: ‘‘[T]he original negative adverb
is . . . found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional
word’’ (Jespersen, 1917: 4). From a structural and logical perspective, there can be no
arguing with this description of NEG2 in BP: the ‘‘doubled’’ post-verbal negative (não) is
not interpreted logically as the negation of the first negative (as in the English teacher’s
dictum ‘‘two negatives make a positive’’), but rather as a structural ‘‘reinforcement’’ of the
preverbal form. Thus, ela não veio à festa não does not and cannot mean ‘‘she didn’t NOT
come to the party’’, but simply ‘‘she didn’t come to the party’’—the second negative in this
BP sentence does not reverse the polarity of the first. From a functional or meaning-based
perspective, however, this characterization of reinforcement is not any clearer than the
intuitive notion of emphasis commented upon above. Indeed, it seems that adding
phonological reinforcement to a preverbal negative is invariably considered to be an
iconic structural means for expressing emphasis on the functional (semantic/pragmatic)
level. But there is no necessary correlation between an additional sentential element on the
structural level and emphasis (however defined) on the level of interpretation.
That being said, it should be pointed out that, even though there is a widespread
tendency to use the term ‘‘emphasis’’ without defining the meaning of the associated
concept behind the term, it nonetheless can be profitably employed when defined in precise
fashion. In the study of negation, this has been done in a series of recent publications by
Michael Israel (e.g. 1996, 1998, 2004), who analyzes negative polarity items (NPIs) in
terms of pragmatic scalar models (cf. Kay, 1990). According to Israel, some NPIs are
emphatic in the sense that they license a proposition which is ‘‘informative because it
exceeds what one would normally expect to be asserted’’ (1998: 47). Thus, the assertion of
a negative sentence like She didn’t drink A DROP of her milk is more informative than the
expected (negative) norm without the NPI a drop, and in fact the proposition it expresses
entails the NPI-less proposition within the same scalar model. Israel’s theory therefore
provides much-needed teeth for the oft-repeated claim that emphasis is a primary function
of reinforced negation, and does so specifically for the class of NPIs characterized as
‘‘minimizers’’.
It seems doubtful, however, that Israel’s theory as it stands can be extended to the
specific case of BP negation. First of all, since the postverbal negative in question in BP is
not a minimizing form like Eng. a drop, but rather the repetition of the preverbal negative
não, it seems rather forced to say that NEG2/3 in BP entails NEG1 in any sense. Thus, one
can see with ease how ‘‘she didn’t drink a drop of her milk’’ could entail ‘‘she didn’t drink
her milk’’ (but not necessarily vice-versa) in a pragmatic scalar model. But, as already
noted, the proposition expressed by the three competing forms of BP negation in (1) above
appears to be one and the same. And, what is more, even if one does accept the claim that
NEG2 is more emphatic, in intuitive terms, than NEG1—an intuition based on the extra
phonological weight of NEG2 vis-à-vis NEG1 and an iconic mapping between this weight
and a corresponding function/meaning—we are still left with the case of the strictly
postverbal NEG3, which does not possess this extra phonological weight, but nonetheless
is functionally very distinct from NEG1. As I will show below, there is a clear information-
structural link between NEG2 and NEG3, which make these constructions much more
similar to each other in meaning/function than to NEG1, and it is this link and the resulting
shared characteristics that lead researchers to consider NEG2/3 as non-canonical negatives,
united in opposition to their canonical counterpart NEG1. In short, then, it is far from clear
that even a well-developed notion of emphasis, as found in Israel’s work, can be applied to
the system of negation in BP.5
But instead of invoking emphasis, what about describing and explaining NEG2/3 in
presuppositional terms, which other researchers have endeavored to do for both BP and
other languages? In this case, the first thing to note is that descriptions such as
‘‘presuppositional’’ or the related ‘‘contrary to expectation’’ are the same ones that have
often been used in the literature to describe the meaning/function of CANONICAL negation
(cf. Horn, 1989, Chapters 1 and 3 for extensive discussion; Givón, 1978). In an oft-cited
passage, Givón (1978: 109) states that ‘‘[n]egatives are consistently more marked in terms
of discourse-pragmatic presuppositions, as compared to affirmatives. More specifically,
negatives are uttered in a context where corresponding affirmatives have already been
discussed, or else where the speaker assumes the hearer’s belief in—and thus familiarity
with—the corresponding affirmatives’’.6 The speaker, then, upon denying the hearer’s
(assumed) belief via the use of negation, contravenes the hearer’s expectation that that
belief is true. Rather similar characterizations of the function of NON-CANONICAL negatives,
in opposition to their canonical counterparts, can be found in the work of scholars like
Schwegler (1991) and Zanuttini (1997). Such notions are therefore problematic since they
seemingly provide little or no means for distinguishing between canonical and non-
canonical forms or for making predictions about where the non-canonical forms may occur
felicitously in discourse.
However, just as in the case of emphasis, it needs to be clarified that prior analyses of
non-canonical negatives in presuppositional terms are inadequate not due to the inade-
quacy of the term or the concept of presupposition itself (which has obviously been defined
in precise fashion in many ways by many scholars), but rather because it is the wrong
concept for the task at hand. In the study of negation more generally, as the quote from
Givón above makes clear, discussion of the presuppositions associated with negation has
5
An anonymous reviewer also suggests the possibility of defining emphasis in terms of relevance, such that
those propositions that are more relevant to the current discourse context could be considered more emphatic than
those of lesser relevance. Though I find this suggestion intriguing, I note that it may actually compound the
problem of defining emphasis with precision, since one would also need a precise definition of relevance (and a
means of measuring this concept) in order to make the idea work.
6
For arguments and empirical evidence against this view of (canonical) negatives, see Fretheim (1984), Jordan
(1998), and especially Thompson (1998) and Tottie (1991). See also the discussion in Section 5 of this paper.
been often considered from a pragmatic perspective, although, as noted by Horn, ‘‘the
attempt to argue that every negative statement . . . PRESUPPOSES an affirmative . . . can be
traced from . . . the eighth century’’ (1989: 63, emphasis in original). Thus, some semantic
presuppositionalists (e.g. Strawson, 1952) have also seen a presupposed (affirmative)
proposition as somehow underlying negation.
Surveying the recent research on negation most pertinent to this paper, it appears to have
been very much in line, though not necessarily explicitly, with Stalnaker’s classic research
on pragmatic presupposition (e.g. 1974, 1978), wherein presuppositions are taken to be
those propositions located in the common ground of the interlocutors and, crucially for
negation, where these ‘‘presuppositions . . . need not really be common or mutual knowl-
edge; the speaker need not even believe them’’ (1978: 321). Thus, for BP in particular,
Schwegler (1991: 194) has claimed that NEG2 ‘‘presuppose[s] a previous affirmative
assertion or assumption which [it] seek[s] to contradict’’. Similarly, for Italian, Zanuttini
has stated that non-canonical non V mica is functionally restricted to denying only those
propositions that are ‘‘entailed by the common ground’’ (1997: 61). And, although not
indicated overtly by either of these authors, the examples they present and discuss seem to
assume that the propositions being denied are believed to be true by an interlocutor. Thus,
on this view, what speakers do through the use of a NEG2 construction is assert a denial or
contradiction of their interlocutor’s belief, which is a proposition that forms part of the
common ground at that point in the conversation, i.e. a pragmatic presupposition. Again,
however, notice that this particular view is nearly identical to (some) views of canonical
negation, such as Givón’s.
One of my aims below, in Sections 2 and 3 especially, is to demonstrate that these
presuppositional explanations of the meaning/function of NEG2/3 cannot be supported
empirically. As I will argue, the problem with a presuppositional analysis, even when this
notion is applied correctly, is two-fold. On the one hand, NEG2/3 cannot be used to deny all
pragmatic presuppositions in the Stalnakerian sense, i.e. any proposition in the common
ground;7 rather, these non-canonical forms are restricted specifically to denials of salient,
discourse-old (Prince, 1992) propositions. On the other hand, NEG2/3 (or NEG1, for that
matter) are not constrained to denials of propositions that someone else (e.g. an inter-
locutor) is assumed to BELIEVE, contra what Schwegler (1991) and Zanuttini (1997) imply
for BP and Italian, respectively. Building on the work of Dryer (1996), I demonstrate that
what is relevant for non-canonical negation in BP is indeed not belief, but rather ACTIVATION
of a proposition in discourse. In contrast to previous accounts, then, I propose more
globally that NEG2/3 in BP is highly sensitive to information-structural properties of the
discourse. This position is somewhat similar to that proposed for Dominican Spanish
double negation by Schwegler (1996: 252), but, again, differs crucially from Schwegler’s
analysis in that I do not rely on (pragmatic) presupposition or assumed interlocutor’s belief
for my explanation. As will be demonstrated below, the proposition that is being denied by
NEG2 is normally contextually activated (Dryer, 1996), but not necessarily believed by any
of the interlocutors. The NEG3 construction will furthermore be shown in section 4 to be
7
The canonical form NEG1, on the other hand, no doubt can be used to deny any proposition in the
conversational common ground.
sensitive to information structure as well, but in a fashion that is even more restricted than
NEG2.
The examples to be analyzed in this paper include a mix of naturally-occurring and
constructed occurrences of negatives. The naturally-occurring examples are taken from
the PEUL corpus, which was compiled by researchers at the Universidade Federal do Rio
de Janeiro in the early 1980s, and consists of sociolinguistic interviews with mainly
lower-class residents of Rio de Janeiro.8 The PEUL examples are indicated by the letter
‘‘E’’ plus a number, enclosed in brackets, e.g. [E09]. Constructed examples have been
checked with multiple native speakers—all also from Rio de Janeiro—and are left with
no indication of their source. The employment of this kind of ‘‘mixed’’ methodology
which combines natural and constructed examples is, in my view, crucial, since any
complete account of the meaning/interpretation of NEG2 requires the close analysis of
both possible and impossible, or at least unlikely, contexts of occurrence for this form.
Prior studies of non-canonical negation in BP have not attempted to push the limits of
NEG2 through native speaker consultation, resulting in a very restricted view of the TYPES
of contexts in which NEG2 may possibly occur. This kind of methodology, which
considers only those examples found in a (spoken) corpus of BP, is of course useful for
characterizing how NEG2 is actually used in the language. However, it leaves unan-
swered exactly where to draw the semantic/pragmatic boundaries between NEG2/3 and
NEG1.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 examines the meaning
/function distinctions between NEG2 and NEG1 by relating them to information-structural
properties. The analysis thereby provides a corrective to recent analyses arguing for the
‘‘functional equivalence’’ of the two NEGs (Furtado da Cunha, 1996, 2001: 27). Section 3
situates NEG2 in BP within a recent typology of negated denials (Geurts, 1998) in order to
further illustrate the pragmatic constraints on the distribution of NEG2. Section 4 presents
data and discussion illustrating that the use of NEG3 is likewise sensitive to information
structure and furthermore restricted to a subset of those contexts in which NEG2 is
possible. Concluding remarks and possible implications of this research are offered in
Section 5.
2. NEG2 and information structure
The primary purpose of this section is to illustrate the close connection between NEG2
and information structure. Although there exist a number of different approaches to
information structure in current pragmatic theory (e.g. Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski,
1993; Lambrecht, 1994; Vallduvı́, 1992), the model of Prince (1992), itself a reformulation
of a well-known earlier model (Prince, 1981), is one that has been applied with
considerable success to a wide range of data. In her later model, Prince (1992) makes
8
The social status of these informants, however, should not be taken to imply that non-canonical negatives in
BP are associated with stigmatized dialects of the language. Indeed, as pointed out by Barme (2002: 192), NEG2/3
are likewise frequent in the informal varieties spoken by educated Brazilians. My informants, all university-
educated, all admit to frequent use of NEG2, as well as to at least some use of NEG3 and do not report social
stigmatization of either form.
the important distinction between the DISCOURSE STATUS and the HEARER STATUS of an NP
referent, with two values for each: NEW and OLD. This creates a set of four cross-cutting
information statuses (cf. Birner and Ward, 1998: 15):
– discourse-new, hearer-old
– discourse-new, hearer-new
– discourse-old, hearer-old
– [discourse-old, hearer-new]
The first three statuses in the list above are attested; however Prince notes that the fourth,
here encased in brackets, is exceptional in that a referent that is already introduced into the
discourse should, barring memory lapses or inattention, also be old for the hearer. The
conception of ‘‘discourse’’ intended in Prince’s model is a broad one, encompassing not
only the ‘‘co-text’’ or the actual linguistic material produced in discourse, but also the
‘‘context’’, including situational features such as the setting and the participants. These
features correspond precisely to the ‘‘situationally evoked’’ entities from Prince’s earlier
model of information structure (Prince, 1981: 236–237). Indeed, in her earlier model,
Prince actually postulates situationally evoked entities as a superordinate category, with
‘‘textually evoked’’ entities being one particular instantiation of this superordinate
category (1981: 236).
The distinction drawn by Prince between discourse status and hearer status has proven
useful for the description of non-canonical syntactic constructions, some of which are
sensitive to the discourse status of a referent, others to its hearer status (Birner and Ward,
1998). Here, I seek to extend the application of Prince’s model beyond NP referents to
propositions, and specifically to the information status of the proposition being negated. I
hypothesize that, in the terms of Prince’s information-structural framework, NEG2 in BP is
SENSITIVE TO DISCOURSE STATUS, not to hearer status. To begin to illustrate this claim, first note
that the NEG2 construction is not possible in a context where the proposition being denied
stems from speaker-based ‘‘expectations’’ that are new to the discourse, as in (2a)
(following standard practice, # indicates a pragmatically infelicitous use):
(2a) [speaker walking down the street and suddenly remembers

she forgot to turn off the stove]
Nossa! Eu não desliguei o fogão (#não)!
‘Damn! I didn’t turn off the stove!’
Even though one would assume an underlying implicit expectation held by the speaker
that she DID turn off the stove, which is then contravened by her own utterance, NEG2 is not
permissible in (2a). Moreover, it does not matter whether the speaker in (2a) utters the
negative sentence in the presence of an interlocutor or not. NEG2 is infelicitous in this
context both as a self-directed utterance and as an interlocutor-directed utterance.
The infelicity of NEG2 in situations such as that of (2a) is difficult to reconcile with any
view of NEG2 as expressing the intuitive notion of ‘‘emphasis’’, since intuitively the
negative form, and indeed the entire utterance in (2a), constitute an emphatic assertion
which denies the truth of a previously assumed proposition (‘‘I turned off the stove’’).
Likewise, the situation seems to provide a clear instance of a negative assertion that is used
to contravene an expectation, a function that has often been associated with NEG2 (Furtado
da Cunha, 2001). Nevertheless, only NEG1 is felicitous in the situation as given in (2a).
Notice however that if we modify (2a) slightly to incorporate the utterance of another
interlocutor, as in (2b), we find that once DISCOURSE-OLD (and therefore hearer-old)
information is accessible to serve as a ‘‘trigger’’ for some propositional content, NEG2
becomes a felicitous option in the same sentence seen in (2a):
(2b) [same situation as (2a)]

A: Você desligou o fogão, né?
‘You turned off the stove, right?’
B: Nossa! Não desliguei não!
‘Damn! I didn’t turn it off!’
The only difference between (2a) and (2b) is that the proposition ‘‘B turned off the
stove’’ has the information status of discourse-old in the latter example, having been
mentioned previously in A’s question. The distinct information status of the proposition
being negated accounts for the contrasting felicity of NEG2 in (2a) and (2b).9
When a proposition is hearer-old in Prince’s terms, but not also discourse-old, NEG2
cannot be employed felicitously. To illustrate, consider another situation in which a
husband and wife expected the plumber to come fix their leaky faucet while they were at
work during the day.10 Upon arriving home before his wife, the husband sees that the
plumber did not in fact come and therefore that the faucet remains leaky. When his wife
arrives home a short while later, also with the prior expectation that the plumber will have
fixed the faucet, the husband can break the bad news to her by saying O bombeiro não veio
‘The plumber didn’t come’, using NEG1. However, the NEG2 version O bombeiro não
veio não would be infelicitous in the same situation, despite the wife’s prior expectation
(like her husband’s) that the plumber would have come and fixed the faucet by that time.
Because the bad news that is being broken is discourse-new information—a negative
utterance expressing a proposition whose purpose is to ‘‘inform’’—it is conveyed in the
form of NEG1, not NEG2.
On the other hand, if the wife had FIRST asked her husband whether the plumber had
come, before the husband mentioned anything to her about the situation, then the latter,
NEG2, reply would have been acceptable, since in that case the negated proposition
(‘‘the plumber came/fixed the faucet’’) would have been discourse-old, activated by the
wife’s question. Once again, then, it is discourse-old status—rather than, say, the simple
‘‘oldness’’ or ‘‘givenness’’ of a proposition—that licenses the use of NEG2.
9
As pointed out to me by Jânia Ramos (p.c.), and confirmed by other native speakers, a crucial part of the
explanation for why (2a) is infelicitous is that the expectation that the speaker turned off the stove must be an
implicit one. If the speaker had made the ‘‘expected’’ proposition explicit mentally, e.g., had previously thought to
herself ‘‘I turned off the stove’’, then (2a) could become felicitous as a denial of that proposition. This possibility
supports the explanation given here, which claims that what is crucial is that the denied proposition simply be
discourse-old. The way in which a discourse-old proposition achieves such status does not seem to matter for the
use of NEG2 (see also example [3] below).
10
I am grateful to Alex Amaral for suggesting this example to me.
Moreover, as Prince’s theory of discourse status predicts (see above), discourse-old

information does not have to be textually evoked, it may be contextually (i.e. non-
linguistically) evoked. Thus, in the same plumber scenario just described, if the wife were
to arrive and make a facial gesture to her husband that he could understand as conveying a
question like ‘‘so, did the plumber come?’’, this would be sufficient to activate the
proposition and therefore would also license NEG2. Likewise, a particular non-linguistic
action may lead a speaker to think that an interlocutor has a certain belief, thereby licensing
NEG2, as in the scenario given in (3):
(3) [Speaker sees interlocutor putting on a coat that is much too

heavy for the current weather]
Não está muito frio não!
‘It’s not very cold out!’
While this same example would be perfectly felicitous with NEG1, the use of NEG2
overtly indexes the speaker’s perspective on what the interlocutor’s reasoning must be in
putting on the heavy coat.
As we can see, then, the proposition being negated can achieve discourse-old status
through several different mechanisms, though textual evocation appears to be the prototype
case among these mechanisms. Note as well that the proposition in question can also often
be inferred on the basis of other discourse-old content. Though the concept of ‘‘inferrable’’
information is essentially left open in Prince’s (1992) typology, examples from BP show
clearly that inferrable propositions may also be targets of NEG2, as long as the speaker
believes that the proposition in question can be inferred on the basis of other discourse-old
information:
(4) E- [. . .] E o samba lá em baixo? Pelo menos o pessoal gosta, não é? (f)
‘And the samba party down there. At least the people enjoy it, right?’
F- É, muita gente vai. Agora eu não vou não. Tem uns dois ou três ano que
eu não entro naquela quadra da Vila para nada.
Eu saı́ foi em oitenta. Em oitenta eu desfilei na Vila.
‘Yes, many people go. Now I don’t go. It’s been two or three years since
I’ve been to that part of the Vila at all. I left in 1980. In 1980 I was in the
parade in the Vila.’
[E06]
In (4), speaker F’s initial assertion that ‘‘many people go to the samba’’ licenses the
inference that the speaker goes as well, i.e. that the speaker forms part of the larger
group that muita gente refers to. The following token of NEG2 denies that inferrable
proposition. But at the same time the use of NEG2 as opposed to NEG1 makes explicit
speaker F’s recognition that the negated proposition could have been inferred on
the basis of the prior assertion that ‘‘many people go’’. The use of NEG2 in such
contexts, then, is highly indicative of the speaker’s metadiscursive awareness: while the
inference that F goes to the samba is licensed by the proposition ‘‘many people go to
the samba’’, by using NEG2 the speaker makes clear that she does not mean to INVITE
this inference, despite its discourse accessibility (cf. Geis and Zwicky, 1971 on invited
inferences).
The distinction between discourse- and hearer-status drawn by Prince’s model is a
crucial one for the initial differentiation of NEG1 and NEG2 in BP, as the preceding
examples have illustrated. However, this distinction is not wholly sufficient on its own. As
noted above, Prince’s model is designed mainly for the referents of NPs, not for
propositional information; as a result, it is not sensitive to other kinds of statuses that
might apply only to propositions. However, Dryer’s (1996) model of the information status
of propositions is useful for this purpose, and otherwise compatible with Prince’s model.
Dryer argues in particular for the necessity of distinguishing between the ‘‘belief status’’
and the ‘‘activation status’’ of so-called ‘‘given’’ propositions in his analysis of the
nonfocus of simple focus sentences. Indeed, Dryer argues that the idea of equating
nonfocus with pragmatic presupposition—as is commonly assumed—is misguided, and
he illustrates the mismatch between the two notions in English examples like the following
(focus marked by CAPS):
(5a) A: Who saw John?

B: MARY saw John.
(5b) A: Who saw John?
B: NOBODY saw John.
(5c) A: Who if anyone saw John?
B: MARY saw John.
Obviously, all three of these dialogues are coherent and pragmatically felicitous. The point
of utmost importance is that it is possible to place both a referring term (Mary) and a non-
referring term (nobody) in focus position as a reply to the question (Who saw John?). This is
due to the fact that an answer to this question does not require prior BELIEF of the truth of the
proposition ‘‘someone saw John’’, even though asking the question as in (5a, b) does seem
to pragmatically presuppose the questioner’s belief in ‘‘someone saw John’’. The questions
in both cases do nevertheless ACTIVATE the proposition ‘‘someone saw John’’ without leading
to any necessary belief about its truth/falsity on the part of the answerer. And, as (5c) shows,
it is possible to suspend belief completely in a WH-question through the addition of an
attenuating phrase like if anyone, which would normally be interpreted as displaying the
questioner’s negative epistemic stance towards the truth of the proposition ‘‘someone saw
John’’. But even though the question in (5c) suspends belief, it is still possible to reply as B
does, presupposing prior belief in this same proposition. The upshot of these facts is that the
belief status and activation status of a proposition are distinct properties, and activation of a
proposition does not necessarily entail belief of that same proposition.11
In contrast to the case of simple focus sentences, Dryer notes that marked syntactic
constructions like it-cleft sentences, in the context of the same questions as in (5), require
11
Likewise, as Dryer points out (1996: 484), belief of a proposition does not entail activation: we probably all
believe the proposition ‘‘Lisbon is the capital of Portugal’’, but presumably it was not activated for most readers
until encountering it in this note.
prior BELIEF of the proposition activated by the question. Put a bit differently, felicitous use
of an it-cleft requires what is usually termed ‘‘pragmatic presupposition’’. In this case,
what is presupposed is the truth of the proposition ‘‘someone saw John’’ in the context of
the question at issue. Compare the felicity of the replies in (5) to the pragmatic oddity of the
replies in (6a) and (6b) (Dryer, 1996: 488):
(6a) A: Who saw John?

B: #It was NOBODY that saw John.
(6b) A: Who if anyone saw John?
B: #It was MARY that saw John.
In sum, then, Dryer demonstrates that, within these question–answer contexts, simple
focus sentences require that there be prior ACTIVATION, but not necessarily belief, of the
proposition ‘‘someone saw John’’. Thus, a person asking a question like who saw John?
does not necessarily believe a priori that the proposition ‘‘someone saw John’’ is true; but
upon asking the question, this proposition is necessarily activated in the discourse.
Conversely, it-cleft sentences require prior BELIEF (=the speaker’s presupposition) of that
same proposition. The answer by speaker B in (6a) is odd because it does not provide a
non-null focus value for the open proposition ‘‘x saw John’’. The answer in (6b) is odd
because it occurs in the context of a question that is biased against speaker A’s prior belief
of the proposition ‘‘someone saw John’’.
Drawing this distinction between activated and believed propositions is crucial for a full
account of NEG2 in BP, because NEG2 is often found in responses to yes/no-questions, as
many other researchers have amply noted (e.g. Schwegler, 1991; Roncarati, 1996). However,
there is no requirement that the yes/no-question must be ‘‘biased’’ toward one particular
possible answer in order for NEG2 to be used felicitously, i.e., there is no restriction on NEG2
such that it can only be used to contravene some implicit or explicit expectation of the speaker
asking the question. A naturally-occurring example of such a context is in (7):
(7) I- [O senhor tem-] [(inint)-] o senhor tem vontade de se mudar um dia,

daqui?
‘Do you hope to move away some day, from here?’
F- Não, não tenho vontade não. (latidos)
‘No, I don’t.’
[E07]
I’s question in (7) does not necessarily presuppose that F hopes to some day move away
from his current neighborhood. That is, there is no necessary prior presumption such that I
believes or expects that F actually wants to move away and will therefore answer the
question in the affirmative. The question does, however, ACTIVATE the proposition ‘‘F hopes
to someday move away from his current neighborhood’’. The NEG2 in F’s response is
perfectly felicitous as a denial of this activated proposition.
A similar example of the use of NEG2 in the reply to a yes/no-question can be seen in
(8). Once again, note that it is not necessary that the interviewer (I) believe a priori that F
actually likes the lottery game that the interviewer asks him about. The linguistic context of
the question in (8) makes this clear:
(8) E- É. Está certo. E o senhor joga, assim, loteria, essas coisas?
‘Yes. That’s right. And do you play, like, the lottery, those things?’
I- No bicho? O senhor gosta?
‘The animal [an illegal lottery game]? Do you like it?’
F- Não, não gosto de jogo de bicho não.
‘No, I don’t like the animal game.’
[E09]
Notice here that I’s question in (8) comes right after E’s question directed toward F
about whether F likes to play the lottery. When speaker I asks his question about the illegal
lottery game, F has not yet offered a reply to E’s more general question about ‘‘the lottery
and those things’’. In the absence of a reply to E, it seems highly implausible that speaker I
believes, upon asking his own question, that F does indeed like the illegal lottery game.
Nevertheless, F’s NEG2-marked reply is felicitous, despite the fact that it can hardly be
understood as contrary to I’s expectations about F’s answer to the question.
The necessity of distinguishing between believed and activated propositions can also be
discerned in examples where NEG2 does not occur in a sentence providing an answer to a
yes/no-question. In (9), speaker F offers up alternative possibilities of eventualities that
could keep the soccer team under discussion from winning:
(9) E- (est.) Quer dizer que tem possibilidade de ganhar?

‘You mean that there’s a chance of winning?’
F- Tem possibilidade. A não ser se acontecer, no campo mesmo, um desastre:
alguém quebrar uma perna, do outro ser expulso, daı́, pode até perder, mas
isso aı́, se deus quiser, não acontece não.
‘It’s possible. Unless there were to occur, on the field itself, a disaster:
someone breaking a leg, another one being ejected, in that case, they could
even lose, but that there, if God wishes, won’t happen.
[E19]
It is clear in (9) that F does not believe that someone will break a leg or be ejected
from the game in question. Instead, it is understood that he is creating possible scenarios
that could damage the team’s chances of winning. His use of NEG2—in the apodosis of
a conditional sentence—is to deny the possible occurrence of these hypothetical
disastrous events, events that exist only in the mental model of the speaker. The
occurrence of these events is therefore activated within the speaker’s mental model,
and in the common ground of the interlocutors, but not believed by any participants in
the conversation.
A similar example comes from an e-mail message from one of my departmental
colleagues (a native of Rio de Janeiro). Here, she first admits that she doesn’t know whether
she uses a certain kind of pronoun when speaking Spanish, and that she would need to listen
to herself in order to know for sure. But even though the speaker herself is admitting that
she does not BELIEVE that she uses the Spanish pronoun, she nevertheless uses NEG2 to
deny the activated proposition, i.e. to deny that she uses this kind of pronoun:
(10) . . . a verdade é que eu nao sei se uso esse tipo de pronome em espanhol,
teria que me ‘‘ouvir’’ com mais cuidado pra ver–mas em principio acho que
nao uso nao. Ou, se uso, tenho certeza que é errado!
‘. . . the truth is that I don’t know if I use that kind of pronoun in Spanish,
I would have to ‘‘listen’’ more carefully to see—but in principle I think that
I don’t use it. Or, if I use it, I’m sure that it’s wrong!’
[e-mail message, 17-June-03]
The felicity of NEG2 in examples (7) through (10) furnishes strong evidence that the
negated proposition is not one that is necessarily presupposed by the speaker to be true (or
‘‘believed’’) in the prior discourse, contra prior analyses like that of Schwegler (1991).12
Rather, all that is required in order to use NEG2 felicitously is the accessibility of a
proposition that has been ACTIVATED by some other discourse-old material. There is likewise
no necessary interpretation that the NEG2 utterance contravenes some expectation, of
either the speaker or an interlocutor. This fact runs counter to the claims of Roncarati
(1996: 101) who states that the principal function of NEG2 is the ‘‘rejeição de uma
assumpção prévia’’ (‘rejection of a previous assumption’). In fact, as pointed out to me by
Gláucia Silva (p.c.), there is actually another postverbal negative construction in spoken BP
that appears to be specialized for the contravention of expectations, namely, (não)
V nada.13 While this construction has not, to my knowledge, been described in the
literature on BP,14 a clear contrast between NEG2 and this construction can be perceived in
examples like the following:
(11a) A: O João foi à festa?

‘Did João go to the party?’
B: Não foi não, mas ele avisou antes que não ia.
‘No he didn’t, but he said before that he wasn’t going.’
(11b) A: O João foi à festa?

‘Did João go to the party?’
B: (Não) foi nada! #Mas ele avisou antes que não ia.
‘He didn’t! But he said before that he wasn’t going.’
Both NEG2 and (não) V nada are possible replies to A’s question in (11), but their
interpretations will be rather different. As has been noted throughout the discussion, there
12
Zanuttini (1997) defends a similar presuppostional analysis for non-canonical (NEG2) forms in Italian and
Piedmontese.
13
Patrı́cia Amaral (p.c.) notes that the não . . .nada construction is also found in European Portuguese, but that
the preverbal não is not optional as it is in BP. In addition, it is only found in replies to prior assertions, not in
answers to questions.
14
This construction is described for European Portuguese by Hagemeijer and Santos (2003).
is no necessary expectation being denied when NEG2 is used. That this is so is illustrated
by the felicity of the continuation (introduced by mas ‘but’) in (11a), which effectively
eliminates any possible interpretation of expectation contravention. In stark contrast, the
(não) V nada construction in (11b) is infelicitous with the same continuation, since this
negative construction is used specifically for contravening expectations (in this case, the
expectations of the speaker and/or the hearer).
Another important advantage of the information-structural analysis being offered here is
that it can account for other NEG2 cases where the preverbal negative is not não, as in (12)
and (13). The possibility of combining with other preverbal negative forms shows that the
postverbal não has as its principal function the indexing of the information status of the
negated proposition:
(12) E- Nossa! Reúne todo mundo assim em festa de natal?

‘Wow! Everyone gets together like that for Christmas parties?’
F- Lá NINGUÉM dá festa não. Lá é muito difı́cil ter festa.
Ninguém lá gosta de festa. Festa só na casa dos outros.
‘There no one gives parties. It’s very difficult to have parties there.
Nobody there enjoys parties. Parties only happen in someone else’s house.’
[E09]
(13) E- você sabe, assim, da história de alguém que foi assaltado, (balbucio) que
teve ir na delegacia. Como é que foi que o delegado falou, essas coisas?
‘And do you know, like, of a story where someone was robbed, that had
to go to the police station. How did the police officer talk, stuff like
that?’
F- [. . .] Se eles (f) me roubar não tem nada na carteira, eles vão levar nada.
Não adianta. A gente NUNCA fomos assaltada não. (alguém fala)
‘If they robbed me there’s nothing in my wallet, they won’t get anything.
It wouldn’t do them any good. We’ve never been robbed.’
[E06]
In (12), the preverbal negative is the pronoun ninguém ‘no one’, while in (13) it is the
adverb nunca ‘never’. Both occur in NEG2 structures where the postverbal negative is não,
and both occur in denials of propositions that can be considered discourse-old. But more
importantly, examples like these are highly problematic for accounts which, following
Jespersen’s original formulation (1917: 4), claim that the phonological weakening of the
initial negative element motivates the occurrence of a ‘‘reinforcing’’ or ‘‘emphatic’’
element in postverbal position.15 Clearly, the bisyllabic negative forms ninguém and
nunca cannot be considered phonetically ‘‘weak’’, in contrast to não, which is often, but
not always, phonetically reduced in preverbal position in NEG2 structures (Ramos, 2002).
As Schwegler (1991: 207) has noted, any view that seeks to explain the occurrence of the
postverbal não in (12) and (13) as owing solely to the phonetic weakness of the preverbal
15
Schwegler (1991: 207) also argues against Jespersen-style phonetic reduction as a cause of NEG2 in BP, but
he does not mention examples like (12) or (13) as evidence for his claims. See also Muller (1991: 216–218).
negative form is difficult to sustain. The use of NEG2 IS explainable, however, on the same
discourse-pragmatic grounds as the other examples examined above: the postverbal
negative indexes the negated proposition as one that is discourse-old and activated in
the prior discourse context.
3. NEG2 in the typology of denials
In her recent study of non-canonical negation in BP, Furtado da Cunha (2001: 27)
reaches the conclusion that NEG1 and NEG2 are functionally equivalent. The discus-
sion in the previous section has attempted to delimit the information-structural
restrictions on NEG2 in order to clearly distinguish it from canonical NEG1, which
is not bound by the information status of the proposition being negated. Nevertheless, it
remains true that, with the exception of (2a) above, NEG1 and NEG2 are both possible
options in the examples presented so far. The question that must be answered then is
whether there are contexts in which NEG1 is a possible option but NEG2 is not.
To my knowledge, no such contexts have ever been identified in the study of BP
negation.
The primary goal in this section will therefore be to offer a first approximation to some
environments where NEG1 but not NEG2 is felicitous. By situating BP NEG2 within the
framework of denial-types, a clearer picture of the form’s restrictions emerges. In a recent
paper, Geurts (1998: 275) offers a typology of four kinds of denials, as follows:
1. Proposition (descriptive negation)

2. Presupposition
3. (Scalar) implicature
4. Form (pronunciation, lexical choice, etc.)
Geurts’ typology is based on the TARGET of the objection of the denial, i.e. whether what
is being objected to is a proposition, a presupposition, an implicature, or some aspect of
linguistic form. His typology overlaps with the well-known binary distinction made by
Horn (1985, 1989, 2002) between DESCRIPTIVE and METALINGUISTIC negation, where the latter
is characterized as ‘‘a device for objecting to a previous utterance on any ground whatever,
including the conventional and conversational implicata it potentially induces, its mor-
phology, its style or register, or its phonetic realization’’ (Horn, 1989: 363). Geurts’
types 2, 3, and 4 would all be included in the broader class of metalinguistic negation in
Horn’s binary classification.
We have already seen ample evidence that NEG2 in BP can be employed in proposition
denials (type 1 above), as illustrated by the range of examples presented above in section 2.
However, the possibility of using NEG2 in any of the other three contexts has not been
examined in prior research. The results of attempting to employ NEG2 in the three non-
propositional types of denials, however, are striking.
For instance, in presupposition denials, where the negation is interpreted as applying to
some presupposition of a prior utterance, not to its asserted content, NEG2 is not possible,
as shown by the contrast between the presupposition denial in (14a), and the proposition
denial in (14b). The continuations of each example are included to disambiguate in clear
fashion the type of denial that is meant to be conveyed:
(14a) A: O João já deixou de fumar.

‘J. has stopped smoking.’
B: Ele não deixou de fumar (#não), ele nunca fumou.
‘He hasn’t stopped smoking, he never smoked.’
(14b) A: O João já deixou de fumar.
‘J. has stopped smoking.’
B: Ele não deixou de fumar (não), ele ainda fuma.
‘He hasn’t stopped smoking, he still smokes.’
The well-known presupposition of deixar de X ‘stop X’, where X is an infinitival verb

form, is that the subject of deixar ‘‘X’ed in the past’’. So, in both examples in (14), what is
presupposed by A’s utterance is that João smoked in the past. The continuation of (14a)
makes it clear that the negation in the first clause applies to the presupposed content
(‘‘João smoked in the past’’), not to the asserted content of A’s utterance. In this case,
NEG2 is not a felicitous option. By contrast, the continuation of (14b) leads to the
interpretation that what is denied in B’s first clause is the asserted content, i.e that João has
stopped smoking, not the presupposition. In this case, NEG2 is permissible.
In the case of implicature denials, and specifically scalar implicatures in Geurts’ model,
what is objected to is the implicated upper bound of some scalar expression (cf. Horn,
1989; Levinson, 2000). Here, NEG2 is once again not a possible option, although NEG1 is
normal in such contexts:
(15a) Eu não gosto do meu professor (#não), eu adoro ele!

‘I don’t like my professor, I adore him!’
(15b) Eu não gosto do meu professor (não), eu odeio ele!
‘I don’t like my professor, I hate him!’
The negation (NEG1) in (15a) does not deny the truth of the proposition ‘‘I like my
professor’’, but rather objects to the scalar strength of the verb gostar ‘to like’. The
continuation clause climbs up the scale ordering degrees of affection to the ‘‘stronger’’ verb
adorar ‘to adore’.16 NEG2 cannot be employed in this situation. In (15b), NEG2 is possible (as
is NEG1) because the continuation clause provides a contradiction to the proposition
‘‘I like my professor’’, not to the scalar strength of the verb in the preceding clause. Thus,
given the continuation of (15b), the negation in the first clause of this example is understood as
propositional (descriptive), and as applying to the truth of the affirmative proposition.
Finally, in the case of what Geurts calls form denials, the negation presents an explicit
objection to some aspect of the use of linguistic form, such as lexical/register choice or
pronunciation. Once again, only NEG1 is felicitous in this ‘‘metalinguistic’’ class of
denials, as illustrated by the examples in (16):
16
By ‘‘stronger’’ here what is meant is that adorar entails gostar, but not vice-versa.
(16a) A: Ele trouxe [trúsi] feijão pra festa.

‘He brought [‘‘incorrect’’ pronunciation] beans to the party.’
B: Ele não ‘‘trouxe’’ [trúsi] feijão (#não), ele ‘‘trouxe’’ [trówsi] feijão.
‘He didn’t [trúsi] beans, he [trówsi] beans.’
(= metalinguistic form denial)
(16b) A: Ele trouxe [trúsi] feijão pra festa.
‘He brought [‘‘incorrect’’ pronunciation] beans to the party.’
B: Ele não trouxe feijão (não), trouxe arroz.
‘He didn’t bring beans, he brought rice.’
(= propositional negation)
In (16a), the objection and subsequent correction of A’s prior utterance targets the
phonetic realization of the verb form trouxe ‘he brought’, which is often ‘‘mispro-
nounced’’, even by some native speakers, as [trusi] instead of [trowsi]. In this case,
NEG1 but not NEG2 can be employed to present the objection. In (16b), the target of the
negation in B’s turn is not an aspect of pronunciation but rather the truth of the proposition
‘‘he brought beans to the party’’. The second clause in B’s reply offers a correction of that
propositional content (‘‘he brought RICE’’). Again, in this case of proposition denial, NEG2
(as well as NEG1) is a felicitous alternative.
The generalization to be drawn here, then, is that NEG2 in declarative sentences is
strongly restricted to proposition denials, i.e. where an interpretation of the negative
construction as descriptive negation is intended. The use of NEG2 in any of the three
preceding examples, in the absence of a continuation clause for disambiguation, would
automatically lead to a proposition-denial interpretation. Where something other than a
proposition denial and descriptive negation are intended, only NEG1 is possible in BP.
Note that this result would be rather surprising on an account of NEG2 as a marker of
‘‘emphasis’’, since metalinguistic negation contexts are intuitively emphatic and also
highly marked from an interactional standpoint, insofar as they often require an adjustment
in processing and lead to ‘‘garden-path’’ effects (Carston, 1996; Chapman, 1996;
Yoshimura, 2002) But the restrictions follow directly from the present analysis, which
claims that NEG2 in declaratives is sensitive to PROPOSITIONAL information, and specifically
restricted to proposition denials of discourse-old or inferrable propositions.
At this point, however, a question that might be asked is this: Why don’t speakers
ALWAYS use NEG2 to indicate a denial of contextually-activated propositions? This is, quite
possibly, the principal research question in many realms of pragmatics. For example, in the
study of information structure more generally, non-canonical syntactic forms are not
always chosen even though the necessary conditions for their employment are met in a
given discourse context (cf. Vallduvı́, 1992). Nevertheless, to my knowledge an explana-
tion for why these forms are NOT chosen has never been advanced.
A possible answer to this question in the case of BP negation is that speakers only
choose NEG2 when they want to ensure that their interlocutors draw the correct inferences
about the proposition denial in question. Since these inferences can also often be drawn
through the use of NEG1, albeit presumably with a greater degree of inferential work on the
interlocutor’s part, NEG2 is not necessarily used in all cases when its information structural
requirements are met.
To the extent that this answer is plausible, however, it can only be considered a partial
one, since there are other instances where the choice of NEG1 or NEG2 can lead to clear
interpretational differences. This is especially true in the prototypical context of negative
replies to yes/no-questions. Consider the two possible replies B1 and B2 to A’s question in
(17):17
(17) A: O João votou no Lula?

‘Did João vote for Lula?’
B1: (Não.) Não votou não.
‘(No.) He didn’t vote (for him).’
B2: (Não.) Ele não votou.
‘(No.) He didn’t vote (for anyone).’
These two replies are not equivalent. The use of NEG2 as in B1 would be understood
as denying the truth of the proposition explicitly activated by A’s question, leading to the
interpretation that speaker B did not vote for Lula, but instead for some other candidate.
In contrast, the use of NEG1 as in B2 would be understood as asserting that the speaker
did not vote FOR ANYONE. It therefore appears that the function of the postverbal negative
não is to index the reply with the most accessible discourse-old proposition. By choosing
NEG1 instead of NEG2, the speaker is signaling that the reply must be interpreted with
respect to some other, less accessible, proposition. Thus, while it is true that A’s question
in (17) would be taken as conveying the speaker presupposition that B voted for
someone, or simply that B performed the act of voting, this proposition is not as
accessible as the proposition ‘‘B voted for Lula’’, which is activated by the question
directly.18
The choice of NEG2, then, is most strongly called for when the speaker aims to signal in
overt fashion the negation of some contextually-activated proposition. This does not mean,
however, that speakers who employ NEG2 cannot activate the information to be denied in
the negative utterance itself. Indeed, another, albeit less frequent, strategy found in the
PEUL data is that of using NEG2 ‘‘autonomously’’ to deny a proposition that represents a
viewpoint that cannot necessarily be identified either with that of the speaker or of an
interlocutor. An example illustrating this situation is (18):
(18) F- [. . .] Porque a gente chega aqui mesmo, dentro do Brasil- você viaja, por
exemplo, para o norte, você sente diferença, até de estado para estado
num- no próprio norte. Você- se você chegar em Pernambuco, ele não
fala a mesma coisa que fala o baiano não.
17
The subject pronoun ele ‘he’ is included in B2 because my consultants found the example to be odd without
it. On the other hand, they agreed that its PRESENCE would be odd in reply B1. Thus, presence/absence of the
subject pronoun, even when there is sameness of reference across question and answer, may also play a part in
cueing the correct interpretation.
18
Interestingly, according to my native speaker consultants the interpretation associated with NEG2 in negative
replies to yes/no-questions is parallel to that of the simple one-word answer não.
‘Because we go right here, within Brazil- you travel, for example,

to the north, you hear the difference, even from one state to another,
in the north. You- if you go to Pernambuco, they don’t speak the same
way as Bahians do.’
[E14]
The use of NEG2 in (18) makes it clear that the speaker is aware of a competing
viewpoint: he denies the truth of the proposition ‘‘speakers from Pernambuco speak the
same way as Bahians’’, but at the same time acknowledges that this viewpoint is one that
others might hold (and in fact is held by a large segment of the population in Rio). The use
of NEG1 instead of NEG2 here is possible, but odd given the context since it would leave
unacknowledged the connection between F’s assertion that Pernambucanos do not speak
the same way as Bahians and the (widely-held) viewpoint that maintains that they do speak
the same way. Thus, NEG2 is an economical way for the speaker to introduce that
viewpoint into the discourse and also deny it at the same time, integrating the new
information of the assertion with the already-known information corresponding to the
viewpoint in question. The NEG2 construction is seemingly working here as a kind of
‘‘proxy’’ for the speaker, licensing the introduction of a new topic (albeit one that is closely
related to what preceded) as if it had already been mentioned in the discourse.
The strategy being employed in (18) is rather reminiscent of a set of pragmatic
phenomena found in other languages. In a recent paper, Waltereit (2001) argues convin-
cingly that the main function of Germanic modal particles is to accommodate a speech act
to a discourse context. He then points out that even though the Romance languages lack a
uniform class of modal particles, they do have other grammatical forms that realize
comparable functions. According to Waltereit (2001: 1399–1400), the shared pragmatic
function of all these forms is that of
. . . invoking a speech situation that provides the lacking preparatory conditions
required for the speech act, [serving] a very basic communicative purpose: the
justification of the speech act in the respective situation. It is often the case that
speakers wish to perform a speech act that is not sufficiently licensed by the speech
situation or that might have undesired side-effects. If they nevertheless want to
perform the act and if they want to avoid undesired consequences, they must somehow
justify it . . . Invoking a speech situation that displays the desired preparatory
conditions is apparently a very ‘cheap’ means of justification, as it needs merely
an additional particle, or an additional affix or similarly ‘‘light’’ linguistic means.
In other words, there exist linguistic forms whose main function is to provide a
‘‘substitute’’ for the felicity conditions of the speech act in which they appear. This
function is especially understandable in the case of negation more generally, which very
often requires specific discourse licensing in order to be felicitous (Givón, 1978). In the
case of NEG2 specifically, it appears that speakers sometimes exploit the usual requirement
that the negated proposition be discourse-old in order to accommodate their negative
assertion to the discourse situation:
(19) E- E morava aonde- antes aonde?
‘And you lived before where?’
F- Morava mais para lá para o outro lado de lá, lado de lá.
Não era casa pequena não. Ela tinha um quintal muito grande, aı́ criava
pato, muitos pato, dava ovos para os outro, (est) pato mesmo, dava para
os outro comer pato . . .
‘I lived more towards there by the other side of there, side of there.
It wasn’t a small house. It had a large yard, there I raised ducks, many
ducks, I gave eggs to the others, duck itself, I gave ducks to others so
they could eat ducks . . .’
[E16]
Replacing NEG2 with NEG1 in the context of this example would once again be odd
since there seems to be no topical relevance of the proposition ‘‘it was not a small house’’ to
the question asked by E (‘‘where did you live before?’’). However, by utilizing NEG2, the
speaker can introduce the negated version of the affirmative proposition (‘‘it was a small
house’’) AS IF it had already been activated in the discourse context. The negative assertion
serves to provide a new, but still closely related, topic—the spaciousness of the old house—
for the speaker’s ensuing commentary, which describes the house and yard in greater detail.
This seemingly non-licensed use of NEG2 is an important one, since it may be a prime
determinant for the continued topical structure of the discourse, not only in declarative
sentences such as those analyzed to this point, but also in negated imperatives. The use of
NEG2 is found frequently in negative commands whose prime goal is to get someone to
stop doing something:
(20) [Mother to young son who is trying to grab a vase]
Não pega isso não!
‘Don’t grab that!’
In this context, the young son’s observable physical action of trying to grab the vase is
propositionalized and acts as a discourse-old trigger for the negative command, thereby
permitting NEG2.
However, when an action or a proposition is not discourse-old, NEG2 is typically not a
felicitous option in the context of a negative imperative, while NEG1 is. Hence, NEG1 is
fine in (21), but NEG2 is odd:
(21) A: Ano que vem a gente vai viajar a Salvador.

‘Next year we’re going to travel to Salvador.’
B: Quando vocês chegarem lá, não vão ao Restaurante Irina (#não).
‘When you get there, don’t go to the Irina Restaurant.’
Again, as before, the discourse-old status of a proposition will license NEG2 with
negative imperatives, as shown in (22):
‘Next year we’re going to travel to Savador.’
B: Não vão lá não!
‘Don’t go there!’
However, the picture is a bit more complicated than the contrast between (21) and (22)
suggests. NEG2 in an example like (21) above is actually possible when additional
justification for the negative imperative is provided in the ensuing discourse, as in (23):

‘Next year we’re going to travel to Salvador.’
B: Quando vocês chegarem lá, não vão ao Restaurante Irina não, porque esse
lugar é muito ruim e quando a gente comeu lá todo mundo ficou doente.
‘When you get there, don’t go to the Irina Restaurant, because that place is
really bad and when we ate there everyone got sick.’
The use of NEG2 in this context is motivated by the same factors already seen in (18) and
(19) above: the speaker employs the doubled negative structure strategically as a means to
introduce into the discourse a new topic (a specific restaurant in Salvador) that is indirectly
related to the ongoing discourse topic (an upcoming trip to Salvador), thereby making this
new topic available for subsequent comment (e.g. explaining why they should not visit the
restaurant mentioned). Native speakers that I consulted found either NEG1 or NEG2 to be
felicitous in this last example, but only NEG1 was possible in (21) above, where these same
speakers all agreed that the use of NEG2 requires that more be said about the restaurant in
question.
In view of these last few examples and the corresponding discussion, a question which
might arise is whether such uses of NEG2 constitute counterexamples to the information-
structure account offered in section 2 above. I do not believe that they do. In fact, they
actually appear to build upon the licensing conditions for NEG2 described in the previous
section, insofar as they use the NEG2 construction as a proxy for a discourse-old
proposition. The common thread between the two types of uses is that in both cases
NEG2 is tightly linked to discourse topicality. In the more prototypical cases seen in
section 2, NEG2 is used, at least in part, to signal topic continuity, while in the cases seen
immediately above NEG2 is used to shift topicality to a new, yet closely related, topic, a
task which is made easier by the use of a form (i.e. NEG2) that is normally used to signal
topic continuity. Thus, although it is fair to say that the examples in (18), (19), (22) are
clearly extensions of NEG2 beyond more prototypical examples like (2b) or (4) above, they
are extensions that provide additional corroboration for the proposed information-struc-
tural analysis of NEG2 more generally.
4. The case of NEG3
So far I have focused exclusively on the NEG2 construction, with no discussion of the
‘‘other’’ non-canonical structure—i.e. NEG3—of expressing sentence negation that was
exemplified at the outset in example (1c). NEG3 is frequent in northeastern Brazil, but also
well-known in several other regions of Brazil. Schwegler’s (1991) analysis of two hours of
continuous conversation from Salvador (Bahia) is the only study I am aware of where a
significant proportion of NEG3 utterances is reported. Of 204 total negated declaratives,
Schwegler found 144 cases (70.6%) of NEG1, 26 cases (12.7%) of NEG2, and 34 cases
(16.7%) of NEG3. However, in other studies, the percentage of NEG3 has turned out to be
much lower. Thus, in the city of Natal, also located in northeastern Brazil, Furtado da
Cunha (1996, 2001), found only 9 examples of NEG3 out of 1465 negatives (.6%) in her
corpus of spoken language. And Roncarati (1996) found only 39 examples of NEG3 out of
813, or 4.7%, in a spoken corpus compiled in Fortaleza in northeastern Brazil. Both of
these latter scholars found a much greater use of NEG2 than NEG3, 10.8 and 17.9%,
respectively, contrary to Schwegler’s results in Salvador, where NEG3 was more frequent
than NEG2. However, it should be noted that Schwegler’s data were wholly restricted to
replies to a short yes/no-question that was presuppositionally loaded and purposely
designed to elicit NEG3. This difference in the kind of data used to tally NEG3 tokens
most likely explains the quantitative differences found by these authors.
In the PEUL transcripts of tape-recorded conversations analyzed for this study, NEG3
was not frequent but did occur occasionally. In addition, my native-speaker consultants
(again, all natives of Rio de Janeiro) all claimed to use NEG3, despite the fact that they
were also unanimous in labeling it to be stereotypical of northeastern Brazil. Nonetheless,
these native speakers also recognized strict discourse-pragmatic constraints on the
occurrence of NEG3. For instance, all agreed that it would be possible as a negative
reply in (24), as would NEG2:
(24) A: Você gostou da palestra da Maria?

‘Did you like Maria’s talk?’
B: Gostei não.
‘I didn’t.’
B’s reply in (24) constitutes a denial of the proposition directly activated by A’s
question, namely ‘‘B liked Maria’s talk’’. However, only NEG2 was considered a possible
reply in the following example (25), suggesting that NEG3 has a more restricted discourse-
pragmatic distribution than NEG2.
(25) A: Você gostou da palestra da Maria?

‘Did you like Maria’s talk?’
B1: #Fui não.
B2: Eu não fui não.
‘I didn’t go.’
Based on A’s question in (25), it is inferrable that A believes (i.e. pragmatically

presupposes) that B went to Maria’s talk. As a result, the use of NEG2 as in B2 is
permissible. NEG3, however, is more restricted, at least for speakers from Rio, in the sense
that it requires a denial of the proposition that was DIRECTLYACTIVATED by the content of the
question asked by A, as in (24) above. The proposition denied by B in (25) is not explicitly
activated by the question, but rather derived from it via a process of conversational
inference.
Naturally-occurring examples of NEG3 from the PEUL corpus can be seen in (26)
through (28) below. Notice that, in each case, NEG3 is employed to negate a proposition
that is directly activated by the interviewer’s question. Indeed, in every example, the verb in
the interviewer’s (E) question is the same as the one in the respondent’s (F) answer, except
for the expected difference in person marking.
(26) E- Dezenove- (ruı́dos ao fundo vozes) você tem vontade de mudar um dia?
‘Nineteen- (background noises) do you have a desire move someday?’
F- Tenho não . . .
‘I don’t.’
[E10]
(27) E- Mas você cozinha. E você deve ter algum prato que os seus fregueses
gostam mais. (riso f) Qual é?
‘But you cook. And you must have some dish that your clients like
most. What is it?’
F- Ah, eu cozinho não, a minha tia é que cozinha! (rindo)
‘Ah, I don’t cook, my aunt is the one that cooks!’
[E10]
(28) E- . . . Você pode comparar isso . . . sensação que você tem, quando está
desfilando na escola de samba?
‘You can compare that . . . sensation that you have, when you’re parading
with the samba school?’
F- Posso não, duas coisas diferente.
‘I can’t, two different things.’
[E21]
Unfortunately, there are too few examples of NEG3 in the PEUL corpus to draw any
concrete statistical generalizations. However, in her study of negation in Fortaleza,
Roncarati (1996: 107) found that 28/39 (72%) of the NEG3 tokens in her corpus
included the repetition of the same verb from a preceding question. In addition, she
implies that, of the other 11 examples of NEG3, most of them are the expression ‘‘Sei
não’’ (‘I don’t know’) as a reply to a yes/no-question, which she considers to be a
lexicalized form.19
Thus, it appears that the principal difference between NEG2 and NEG3 is related to the
discourse accessibility of the proposition being negated: NEG3 requires a proposition that
has been EXPLICITLYACTIVATED in the discourse, while NEG2 only requires a proposition that
is accessible on the basis of some discourse-old proposition, e.g., an inferrable proposition.
But could this restriction be even stronger, such that NEG3 is constrained to repetitions
of the same verb, as in the preceding examples and as strongly implied by Roncarati’s
(1996) study? Such a restriction is clearly not operative for NEG2, which may be used to
negate a discourse-old proposition, as in (29) and (30) below, without any necessary
repetition of the same verbal lexeme from the interviewer’s question:
19
As pointed out to me by Armin Schwegler (p.c.), and confirmed by my consultants, sei não is common as a
side comment in highly informal dialogue, a setting that is not easily found in linguists’ recordings. This is one
reason why documented cases of NEG3 may be far fewer than what is actually found in everyday speech.
(29) E- (est.) E, assalto, já houve algum assalto (hes) lá no prédio, Carlos,
que você saiba?
‘And, assault, has there been any assaults there in the building,
Carlos, that you know of?’
F- Não [até]- até [no]- no momento, não teve assalto lá não.
‘No, until, until now, there haven’t been any assaults.’
[E19]
(30) E- E, você faria diferença, assim, entre a educação de um rapaz e a
educação de uma moça?
‘And, would you make a difference, like, between the education of a
boy and the education of a girl?’
F- Não. (ruı́do) Acho que não tem diferença não.
‘No. I think there’s no difference.’
[E19]
In (29), the interviewer E asks the question about the occurrence of assaults in the
building using the past tense of the existential verb haver ‘to be/exist’, i.e. houve ‘there
was’. In BP (as opposed to European Portuguese), the use of haver in the spoken language
is very rare, and BP speakers tend to use a form of ter ‘to have’ as the main existential
instead. This is exactly what happens in (30), where speaker F replies with the past tense
form teve instead of houve. Nevertheless, since NEG2 only requires that a PROPOSITION be
derivable from the discourse context, i.e. it is not necessarily dependent on any lexical item
from that context, the use of NEG2 is perfectly felicitous. A similar explanation holds for
(30), where the interviewer E asks interviewee F whether he ‘‘would differentiate between
the education of a boy and that of a girl’’, using the verbal collocation fazer diferença ‘make
a difference’. F replies not with this same collocation, but with the existential construction
ter diferença. Nevertheless, the proposition F is denying is tantamount to the one derivable
from E’s prior question.
The native speakers of BP that I consulted about examples (29) and (30) all found NEG2
to be a normal choice in these contexts. However, these same speakers also found NEG3 to
be a possible option in (29) and (30), precisely because of the fact that the negated material
in each case could be interpreted as denying the truth of the proposition activated in the
preceding question. That is, all agreed that a reply like that of B in (29’) below would be
possible, and of course the same answer repeating the verb in the preceding question, as in
(29’’) would also be felicitous:
(28’) A: Já houve algum assalto no prédio?

‘Has there already been an assault in the building?’
B: Não. Teve assalto não.
‘No. There haven’t been any assaults.’
(28’’) A: Já teve algum assalto no prédio?
‘Has there already been an assault in the building?’
B: Não. Teve assalto não.
‘No. There haven’t been any assaults.’
Table 1
BP negatives, by information status of the negated proposition
Form Discourse-new Inferrable Directly activated
NEG1 OK OK OK
NEG2 # OK OK
NEG3 # # OK
The conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing evidence is that NEG3 is constrained to
a proper subset of those contexts in which NEG2 also occurs. Thus, while both NEG2 and
NEG3 are functionally opposed to NEG1 (pace Schwegler, 1991 but contra Furtado da
Cunha, 2001), NEG3 is employed specifically to deny a discourse-old proposition that has
been explicitly activated in the discourse context. While this function is most often carried
out in replies that include the repetition of a verbal lexeme from the preceding question,
NEG3 is not restricted by the form of the question, only by its propositional content. There
is also the possibility of lexicalized phrases with NEG3 such as sei não, as noted by
Roncarati (1996), but the occurrence of these phrases is relatively infrequent (but see also
footnote 19 above).
Moving through the paradigm of negatives from NEG1 through NEG2 to NEG3, then,
one finds that these forms show an increasing degree of reliance on the discourse context.
NEG1 is free to deny expectations that are strictly speaker- and/or hearer-old but discourse-
new, i.e., propositions that have not been ‘‘triggered’’ in any way by the content of the
ongoing discourse.20 NEG2, in contrast, requires a proposition that is activated by
discourse-old content, but this proposition may be one that is inferentially derived from
another discourse-old proposition or even, in some cases (cf. [18] and [19] above), one that
is presented as if it were discourse-old by speakers themselves. NEG3, lastly, is the most
restricted sentence negator in the paradigm, as has been illustrated in this section, insofar as
it is restricted to denials of propositions that are directly activated in the ongoing discourse.
The differential status of the three negatives in the paradigm can be represented as in
Table 1, categorized according to the information status of the proposition targeted in the
denial (the symbol # indicates the infelicity of the negative with the proposition-type
given).21
As this table illustrates, all three negatives are felicitous options when the proposition
being denied has been directly activated in the discourse context. Propositions inferrable on
the basis of discourse-old information are felicitously denied using NEG1 or NEG2, but not
NEG3. And only NEG1 can be employed in the negation of discourse-new propositions; as
has been shown in a number of examples above, neither NEG2 nor NEG3 are felicitous
options when negating discourse-new propositions.
20
As pointed out by Thompson (1998: 325), ‘‘negative clauses function largely to deny, but what they deny is
typically not explicitly present in the conversation’’. In BP, this ‘‘standard’’ (ibid.) function of negatives is carried
out by NEG1. See also the discussion in Section 5 below.
21
Another possible distinction between NEG2 and NEG3 is that NEG2 is more obviously felicitous in denials
of situationally (non-linguistically) evoked propositions, while NEG3 appears to be considerably more marginal,
at least for speakers from Rio. Further research is needed on this point.
5. Conclusion
My goal in this paper has been to provide a comprehensive explanation for the
distribution of non-canonical negatives, and especially NEG2, in BP. I have argued that
the meaning/function of NEG2 can be explained on information-structural grounds,
contrary to previous analyses, which have relied nearly exclusively on intuitive and/or
poorly-defined notions such as emphasis, reinforcement, counter-expectation, and
presupposition. The present analysis is much more far-reaching: in all cases the
proposition denied by NEG2 can be considered discourse-old, either by appearing
explicitly in prior discourse or by being inferrable from other contextual material. This
proposition is not necessarily one that is believed (=presupposed) by an interlocutor, but
rather needs only to be activated in the discourse (including extralinguistic) context. On
the other hand, NEG2 is not possible in cases where the proposition being denied
corresponds to information that is hearer-old, but discourse-new, in Prince’s (1992)
terms. Looking at this from a different perspective, negative statements that are
discourse-new, and therefore primarily ‘‘informative’’, are overwhelmingly encoded
by NEG1 (Armin Schwegler, p.c.).
A similar explanation was advanced for the strictly postverbal form NEG3, with the
additional proviso that NEG3 is primarily constrained to denials of a discourse-old
proposition that has been EXPLICITLY activated in the discourse context. Thus, the essential
difference between NEG2 and NEG3 concerns the way in which a discourse-old proposi-
tion is activated: the former form, but not the latter, can be employed in denials of
propositions that are inferrable from other discourse-old information.
As shown in Schwenter (2002), this analysis permits the unification of different non-
canonical negative structures of several different types across the Romance languages (cf.
also Schwenter, 2000, 2003 on the contrast between no and tampoco in Spanish). In
addition, it also provides close parallels with other negative phenomena in unrelated
languages, and suggests that the distinction between different negative expressions is
intimately tied up with information-structural considerations. To take a rather different
example, discussed by Horn (1978, 1989), we can consider the contrast between unin-
corporated and incorporated negation in some pairs of English verbs. According to Horn,
this contrast is sensitive to the information status of the denied proposition:
(31a) I don’t know if Bill is going to take syntax or not, but I’m going
to persuade him not to.
(31b) #I don’t know if Bill is going to take syntax or not, but I’m going to
dissuade him from taking it.
(31c) Bill wants to take syntax, but I’m going to [persuade him not to/dissuade him
from taking it].
While the unincorporated form persuade not is felicitous in (31a) regardless of what the
speaker thinks Bill’s intentions are, the incorporated form dissuade as in (31b) is odd if the
speaker holds no prior assumptions about what Bill plans to do. Where Bill’s intentions
with regard to the syntax class are already known to the speaker—that is, where these
intentions are hearer-old, but not necessarily discourse-old—as in (31c), either the
unincorporated or the incorporated form is possible, as shown by the two alternatives in

brackets.
Finally, it may seem quite paradoxical that the functions that I have described above for
NEG2/3 in BP are the same ones that many, if not most, scholars (e.g. Clark, 1974; Givón,
1978; Horn, 1989; Schwegler, 1988) deem to be the primary ones for CANONICAL sentence
negators. This paradox arises precisely from the association between what are clearly
‘‘marked’’ forms for negation—NEG2/3 versus the ‘‘unmarked’’ NEG1—and what prior
research has characterized as the principal, or unmarked, function of sentence negation:
‘‘the prototypic use . . . of negation is indeed as a denial of a proposition previously
asserted, or subscribed to, or held as plausible by, or at least mentioned by, someone
relevant in the discourse context’’ (Horn, 1989: 203). Why are more marked forms being
used for what appears to be the most typical discourse function of negation?
One part of the answer to this question is that markedness in this case is not primarily
regulated by functional factors such as the type of denial conveyed, but rather by
distributional criteria. As implied by Table 1 above, the relationship between the form
of sentential negation and distributional extension in discourse in BP is as follows:
NEG1 > NEG2 > NEG3. Thus, NEG1 has a much wider distribution than NEG2 which,
in turn, is much less distributionally restricted than NEG3. As a result, negative forms like
NEG2 and NEG3 in BP are considered marked or noncanonical mainly due to the
contextual licensing restrictions that keep them from appearing in many contexts amenable
to the unmarked or canonical negative form NEG1.
Another, more important, part of the answer to the aforementioned question, however, is
to be found in the observation that previous comprehensive studies of the actual USE of
negatives in both speech and writing has shown that ‘‘denial of an activated proposition’’ is
a function that occurs rarely, if ever, in naturally-occurring discourse (Thompson, 1998;
Tottie, 1991). Thus, the empirical results of these kinds of corpus-based studies do not
uphold the standard position exemplified in the quotes from Horn and Givón presented
previously in this paper, and held by many other prominent scholars such as Jespersen
(1917), namely that ‘‘negation—in its ‘chief use’ (Jespersen) . . . —is directed at a
proposition already in the discourse model’’ (Horn, 1989: 203).22 On the more empirically
accurate view of scholars like Thompson and Tottie, then, the functional differentiation of
the negation system in BP is readily comprehensible: the non-canonical forms NEG2 and
NEG3 serve to indicate in explicit fashion, via their distinct coding vis-à-vis NEG1, what is
actually a highly marked and infrequent function in discourse, that of denying a proposition
that is already activated in the current discourse context.
22
The position taken by the scholars I am citing here does not appear to be unique in the least. As Thompson
(1998: 325) points out, ‘‘many linguists . . . have expressed [to Thompson] their convictions that negative clauses
constitute a ‘response’ to something . . . [but] the data do not bear out this claim’’. Likewise, Fretheim (1984: 50)
contends that, ‘‘Those linguists who have maintained that a person asserting p always assumes that the
addressee believes p to be true, or is more inclined to believe p than its contradictory, have made too sweeping
generalizations’’. My assumption is that this ‘‘standard’’ position has widespread acceptance because of the
general tendency to study sentential negation divorced from its discourse context. The end result of employing this
methodology is that negative sentences, presented in isolation, are most easily understood as replies or rejoinders
to prior affirmatives, whether expressed or implied.
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Lingua 115 (2005) 1427–1456

The pragmatics of negation in

Keywords: Negation; Information Structure; Pragmatics; Brazilian Portuguese

(1a) A Cláudia não veio à festa. (NEG1)

emphasis—which he argues is conveyed through intonational highlighting (1991: 193)—

2. NEG2 and information structure

(2a) [speaker walking down the street and suddenly remembers

(2b) [same situation as (2a)]

Moreover, as Prince’s theory of discourse status predicts (see above), discourse-old

(3) [Speaker sees interlocutor putting on a coat that is much too

(5a) A: Who saw John?

(6a) A: Who saw John?

(7) I- [O senhor tem-] [(inint)-] o senhor tem vontade de se mudar um dia,

(9) E- (est.) Quer dizer que tem possibilidade de ganhar?

(11a) A: O João foi à festa?

(11b) A: O João foi à festa?

(12) E- Nossa! Reúne todo mundo assim em festa de natal?

3. NEG2 in the typology of denials

1. Proposition (descriptive negation)

(14a) A: O João já deixou de fumar.

The well-known presupposition of deixar de X ‘stop X’, where X is an infinitival verb

(15a) Eu não gosto do meu professor (#não), eu adoro ele!

(16a) A: Ele trouxe [trúsi] feijão pra festa.

(17) A: O João votou no Lula?

‘Because we go right here, within Brazil- you travel, for example,

(21) A: Ano que vem a gente vai viajar a Salvador.

(23) A: Ano que vem a gente vai viajar a Salvador.

4. The case of NEG3

(24) A: Você gostou da palestra da Maria?

(25) A: Você gostou da palestra da Maria?

Based on A’s question in (25), it is inferrable that A believes (i.e. pragmatically

(28’) A: Já houve algum assalto no prédio?

unincorporated or the incorporated form is possible, as shown by the two alternatives in

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