Negative doubling: in favor of a big NegP analysis

In this work, I reformulate Pollock’s (1989) analysis of French discontinuous negation and argue in favour of a cartographic approach to the category called NegP. I propose that it is a complex category which contains at least four different projections and I will show that the various types of discontinuous negation found in several Northern Italian dialects can be analysed in the sameway as DP doubling has been analysed by Kayne (1975) and Belletti (2005), i. e. as independent movement of structural portions of an originally unitary constituent containing all negativemarkers firstmerged inside the VP. This proposal explains the numerous exceptions to Zanuttini’s (1997) analysis noted by Manzini & Savoia (2011) without rejecting the core of her proposal. Furthermore, this view is potentially interesting in awider perspective if we assume that each of the elements identified here expresses structural projections relevant to semantics and could ultimately lead to a different way of conceiving negation as something different from the operation of formal logic which negates propositions.