Emphatic polarity in European Portuguese and beyond

This paper deals with denials. ‘Emphatic polarity’ is here approached from a well-defined perspective that focuses on the syntactic expression of reversing reactions to assertions.Three syntactic strategies to convey emphatic affirmation in the Romance languages are described and their distribution across languages elucidated, namely: the verb reduplication strategy, the sí que (AFF that) strategy, and the sentence-final sim/sí strategy. In order to account for the common traits of the structures displaying emphatic affirmation and concomitantly for their restricted cross-linguistic availability, the paper argues for the hypothesis that: (i) the functional categories C (encoding relative polarity features) and Σ (encoding absolute polarity features) are jointly involved in the syntactic expression of emphatic polarity and must be both phonologically realized in the relevant structures; (ii) verb movement in relation to the functional heads C and Σ (the topmost head of the IP domain) plus the specificities of the polarity lexicon are the main sources of variation across the Romance languages. Under this hypothesis, (i) is the unifying factor that lies behind the variation emerging from (ii). In its final section the paper briefly discusses emphatic negation. Two patterns are identified that parallel respectively the sí que pattern and the sentence-final sim/sí pattern.

► Emphatic polarity is a property of denying responding assertions.
► Three types of syntactic strategy express emphatic polarity in Romance.
► This paper enlightens the restricted availability of each strategy across languages.
► The categories C and Σ are central to the syntactic expression of emphatic polarity.
► V-movement plus the idiosyncrasies of polar words explain cross-linguistic variation.