Tampoco no (and other negative concord phenomena) in vernacular varieties of contemporary Spanish

Abstract

The negative adverb tampoco has not raised enough attention from linguists and, therefore, no monographic analysis has been devoted to its study. This article explores one of the most salient features of this adverb in non-standard Spanish varieties: its tendency to maintain the negative adverb no in preverbal position. This construction is not limited to bilingual varieties, as previous literature has taken for granted. The hypothesis presented in this article proposes that this construction materializes a silent head (no) of Polarity Phrase. To sustain this hypothesis, lexical, syntactic, pragmatic, and diachronic arguments will be considered. This study is based on the analysis of around 700 tokens of tampoco no with data taken from oral and colloquial corpora. The article finally propounds this phenomenon as a Spanish vernacular universal.