ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes a new perspective on non-canonical negation by providing a detailed comparison of a near-equivalent non-canonical negator, which we term NEG-NADA, in two related languages: Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Argentinian Spanish (AS). The role of NEG-NADA in both of these Romance varieties is similar in that it indexes some prior propositional information in the discourse model as the target of negation and carries out the speech act of denying the truth of that prior information. The NEG-NADA construction in each variety is different, however, in the properties of the information that is targeted, and more specifically in how that information has come to form part of the common ground. More generally, we conclude that, cross-linguistically, non-canonical negatives are sensitive to precise information-structural differences.
