Negative imperatives in Eastern Romance languages: Latin heritage and Romance innovation

Abstract

Abstract This paper is a contribution to the study of negative imperatives in Romance. The paper starts from Raffaella Zanuttini, who, like other researchers, notices that most of Romance languages display, under certain conditions, an asymmetry between certain positive and negative imperatives. She holds that, historically, the asymmetry reflects a tendency in Romance of maintaining the early illocutionary Latin distinction between negations nōn and nē (Zanuttini 1997, 128 s.). The present study proposes, too, a historical explanation of this asymmetry. To this purpose, the analysis takes into account negative imperatives in three varieties of Latin, pre-Classical, Classical and Vulgar Latin. The approach leads to a reformulation of Zanuttini’s hypothesis. It is argued that the asymmetry in Romance amply documented in her study is due to the inheritance of the Vulgar Latin imperative system, which turns out to be “incomplete” in the sense that it does not incorporate either the illocutionary distinction nōn/nē or the early behaviour of nē (both visible in pre-Classical and Classical Latin). It is further argued that, if considered from the viewpoint of the Vulgar Latin system of imperative, some Romance innovations managed to independently reconstruct the pre-Classical Latin distinction, on another level of the historic evolution and under a different form. Data from Eastern Romance languages are adduced in support of this view.