VARIATION IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NEGATIVE IMPERATIVE ACROSS ROMANCE LANGUAGES

Negative imperatives in Romance languages are expressed in different ways, but variation seems to be controlled by the distinction between 'true' and 'surrogate' imperatives. In this paper I attempt to formulate a hypothesis which accounts for the nature of this distinction. The structure of the paper is the following. In the first section I present relevant data, then I describe three attempts that cope with this issue and I give a critical evaluation of these attempts; in the last section I propose my own hypothesis.