Relaciones entre intensificación y polaridad: el caso de la perífrasis <ʻcagarseʼ + gerundio> y la negación
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4151/S0718-09342025011901276Keywords:
perífrasis verbal, intensificación, término de polaridad positiva, evento negativo, negación oracionalAbstract
The aim of this study is to examine the interplay between negation and the periphrasis <ʻcagarseʼ+ gerund> (CG), a colloquial expression in Argentine Spanish with an intensifier value. This research seeks to build upon the syntactic-semantic characterization of CG outlined in Autor 1 (2022), in order to explain specific circumstances in which a) negation precedes the construction and b) the interposition of negation between auxiliary and main verb is grammatical. To explore these contexts, we conducted a survey among native residents of Buenos Aires, supplemented by corpus examples. The obtained answers and the corpus examples were subjected to qualitative analysis, while our hypotheses were tested using quantitative methods. Our findings indicate that CG admits interposed negations only when negative events are involved (Fábregas & González, 2019). This suggests a lower structural position of CG within the clause, same as other behaviors of CG such as its position in auxiliaries' chains. Furthermore, we found differences between CG and other non-intensifier periphrases, which suggests that CG behaves as a Positive Polarity Item (PPI). Consequently, like other intensifying elements, it resists being within the scope of clausal negation.
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