Negación metalingüística y estructura oracional. Análisis sintáctico-pragmático de non

Abstract

There are two words in Central and Western Asturian, non and nun, that have traditionally been considered variants of the same linguistic item. However, the differences in their syntactic distribution (Martins 2010, 2014) and their pragmatic and discursive value (Ducrot 1972, Horn 1989) prove the existence of two different negative items. The application of the tests proposed by Horn (1989) and Martins (2010, 2014) bring to light that nun is an internal negative marker (also called sentential or regular negation) that affects the internal structure of the sentence, meanwhile non is a peripheral metalinguistic negative marker, external to the sentential structure, which is used to refute a previous utterance. The status of peripheral marker attributed to non allows us to reduce the number of combinations and sequences, apparently heterogeneous to a basic syntactic structure in which the arrangement of the constituents is closely related to the processes of topicalization and focalization caused by the word non.