Not even a crumb of negation: on mica in Old Italian

In this article I compare the syntactic properties of the postverbal negationmicain Old and Modern Italian. According to many current analyses of the doublingstages of the Jespersen cycle, new negation markers start as lexical items bearingan uninterpretable Negative feature. Gradually these items become interpretableas Negative, which eventually allows them to replace the older sentence negationmarker. I analyze the distribution of the postverbal negationmicain Old andModern Italian and argue that the observed changes are not a consequence ofa change in the interpretability of the Negative feature. Adopting the idea thatnegation is not directly represented in the syntactic spine, I analyze the dia-chronic development ofmicain terms of a different parametric setting in the lexi-calization and attraction properties of Focus and Existential projections.