Emphatic Negation as Focus: A Case Study in Italian

This paper proposes a syntactic approach to ‘emphatic’ negative structures based on three components, namely a) the regular semantics of negation, b) the distinction between Corrective and Contrastive Focus (Bianchi & Bocci 2012), c) the size of the constituent targeted by Focus. We analyze the distribution of Italian ‘emphatic’ negative structures featuring two different lexical items, namely the adverb mica and the response particle NO. On this basis, we argue that their emphatic import corresponds to different functions, which we dub Correction and Confirmation, and that the specific function and pragmatic distribution of each structure is structurally determined.