Some Issues in Negation in Portuguese Scott A. Schwenter The Ohio State University 1. Introduction Negation in Portuguese shares many properties with negation in other Romance languages, but also displays some unique characteristics, especially when we take into account the wider variety of negation strategies found in varieties of spoken Brazilian Portuguese (BP). 1 Because of parallelisms between certain structures and uses of negation and those of non‐negative elements, it would also be necessary to situate negation in the broader perspective of polarity‐related phenomena, such as in the work of Martins (2013) on European Portuguese (EP). However, space limitations prevent me from doing that in detail here, and from providing a comprehensive view of negation and all its intricacies at the sentential, constituent, and other levels. Luckily, this has been done quite recently by Peres (2013), albeit with a near‐exclusive focus on EP. In addition to links between negation and other polarity‐related structures, the interactions of negation with other grammatical phenomena are legion. While those found in Portuguese may not be as striking as in, e.g., English, they still may effect profound changes in linguistic structure. To cite just one of these structural phenomena, consider clitic pronoun placement in EP (Washington 2015). As is well‐known, in finite clauses EP clitics tend to appear in enclitic position (1a). But in the presence of certain triggers, such as complementizer que ‘that’, adverbs like já ‘already’ or também ‘also/too’, or WH‐ questions with a qu‐ word, the clitic instead occurs in proclitic position. Negative words constitute one class of such triggers, as the examples with não ‘not’ and nunca ‘never’ show in (1b, c), where the proclitic position of the clitic te ‘you’ contrasts with its enclitic placement in the affirmative example (1a). (1a) Vi‐te na escola do meu filho. ‘I saw you at my son’s school.’ (1b) Não te vi na escola do meu filho. ‘I didn’t see you at my son’s school.’ (1c) Nunca te vejo na escola do meu filho. ‘I never see you at my son’s school.’ The pattern in (1) is described and at least implicitly prescribed by Portuguese grammars (e.g. Cunha and Cintra 1985) and formal analyses (e.g. Martins 1995). Recent research on naturally‐occurring data (Washington 2015) shows however that individual members of the class of proclitic triggers actually demonstrate differences regarding how often they lead to proclisis in speech or writing. The important point for this chapter is that negative elements can have important interactions with syntactic phenomena, and therefore that 1 For feedback, intuitions, and bibliographical pointers, I am very grateful to Patrícia Amaral, Sonia Cyrino, Maj‐Britt Mosegaard Hansen, Larry Horn, Mary Johnson, Tammy Jones, Luana Lima, Luana Nunes, Lílian Teixeira de Sousa, and Hannah Washington. As Larry would say, needless to say…