Negative imperatives in Portuguese and other Romance languages

The Negative Imperative in Southern Calabria. Spirito Greco, Materia Romanza Again?

“…Given this loss of its subordination uses and its increasing restriction to the second person singular negative imperative, the output of an ongoing and well-advanced process of refunctionalization (cf. Smith, 2005;2011), it is natural to reinterpret the erstwhile infinitive as having shifted from suppletive (25a) to true (25b) imperative in the Romance negative paradigms of Table 10.…”

“…( 28 Significantly, then, we see that, although the infinitive suppletively marks the second-person singular negative imperative in thousands of (especially Italo-) Romance varieties, it is only extended in those varieties where the subordinating uses of the infinitive are radically attrited -under language contact with Greko in the case of southern Calabrian, and under language contact with other varieties of the Balkan Sprachbund (cf. Joseph, 1983;Friedman, 2006;2011;Tomić, 2006;Friedman and Joseph, 2017;2021;Krapova and Joseph, 2019, a.o.; see also Gardani et al, 2021) and, in particular, Greek in the case of Romanian -, such that infinitival morphology is free to be exaptively reinterpreted as a 'true' , dedicated imperatival marker and from there extended to the second-person plural according to an already salient (language-internal or -external) paradigmatic distribution. We thus see that a so-called typical Balkanism has independently undergone a very similar development in two areas -southern Calabria and Romania -which have not otherwise been in contact with each other.…”

“…5 Cf. also Han (1998;2001), Zeijlstra (2006), Manzini and Savoia (2005: Section 7.2), Cavalcante (2011). 6 As correctly pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, a related point is the fact that imperatives often feature a different negator than the one used with indicative verbs, not only in cases of subjunctive suppletion for the negative paradigm, where the same irrealis negator is carried over to the imperative (e.g., standard modern Greek), but also in languages featuring a true negative imperative (e.g., the second person singular in Ancient Greek).…”

Imperativos pretéritos no português brasileiro

“…Ao invés disso, possui imperativos verdadeiros, morfologicamente distintos, como vimos na seção 2.1. Sobre a diferença de comportamento entre o PB e o PE quanto ao não e ao nunca, videCavalcante (2011).…”