Historical and dialectal research on Romanian negative temporal adverbs

The present work tracks the rate of expansion of the negative adverb niciodată ‘never’ and its generalization in contemporary Romanian (both standard and largely prevalent at the dialectal level). The origin of its actual status is historically complicated by its diachronic “competition” with other forms of expressing total temporal negation and its absence at the most remote period of written Romanian (16th century). We have described and followed, at the historical level, three formal patterns of negative adverbs with temporal meaning: i) nece ‘nor’ + relative adverb (e.g. nececăndu lit. ‘not ever’), ii) nece ‘nor’ + indefinite adverb (e.g. necedănăoară (‘not once’), iii) nici ‘nor’ + a second indefinite adverb, whose etymological structure relies on the Romanian synonymy between dată ‘a specific time; one time’ (a femi¬nine participial form of a da ‘to give’ Lat. dāre) and oară ( Lat. hōra) (e.g. neceodată ‘not once’, literally ‘at no time’). Our research examines the historical and dialectal distribution of those three types, as well as the rate of extension of type III at the expense of type II (practically general in old Romanian); it also delves into the survival of type I (highly charac¬teristic to Banat area in old Romanian). We have compared the written usage of the three types described above with their dialectal usage (such as can be seen in recorded versions of dialectal inquests) and their linguistic description in several Romanian grammars along the time.