NEG-NADA: Discourse-pragmatic licensing of non- canonical negation in two related languages Mary Johnson and Scott A. Schwenter Occidental College and The Ohio State University In recent years, research on non-canonical negation can be found on various languages, including Spanish and Portuguese (Schwenter 2003, 2005, 2006), Catalan (Espinal 1993), and Italian (Hansen and Visconti 2009). This research has greatly advanced our knowledge of the differences between canonical and non-canonical negative constructions, and shed considerable light on how non-canonical negatives differ from corresponding canonical negative forms. This chapter contributes a new perspective on non-canonical negation by providing a detailed comparison of a near-equivalent non- canonical negator, which we term NEG-NADA, in two related languages: Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Argentinian Spanish (AS). The role of NEG-NADA in both of these Romance varieties is similar in that it indexes some prior propositional information in the discourse model as the target of negation and carries out the speech act of denying the truth of that prior information. The NEG-NADA construction in each variety is different, however, in the properties of the information that is targeted, and more specifically in how that information has come to form part of the common ground. More generally, we conclude that, cross-linguistically, non-canonical negatives are sensitive to precise information-structural differences.