La Negació i la concordança negativa en català antic

Abstract

In Old Catalan, the conjunction ni and negative quantifiers are reinforced by negation in negative sentences irrespective of the position that they occupy. This syntactic phenomenon, known as «negative agreement», affects both words that were negative elements in Latin (ne or ni, null) and words which acquired a negative meaning in Late Latin or Proto-Romance (res, jamés, mai, etc.). Nevertheless, negative agreement is not a regular feature throughout the Middle Ages, and in medieval texts it is possible to find instances of the elision of no when these adverbs are preverbal. Moreover, gradual loss of agreement does not occur homogeneously, but begins with words that are more peripheral in the sentence (first, ni, and later time adverbials).