Les impératifs négatifs romans. Le cas de l’italien et du roumain

Abstract

The paper presents the situation of the negative imperative in Romanian in comparison with that of Italian. The comparison shows a strong similarity between the two Romance languages, in that both languages exhibit the same contrast between singular and plural in the realization of the negative imperative.
The contrast in Italian is explained in a well-known book of Rafaella Zanutinni (“Negation and Clausal Structure”) through the existence of two kinds of imperatives: imperatives with and without mood morphology. I show that this explanation cannot be adopted for Romanian, even if, given the fact that the explanation is built within the framework
of Universal Grammar, this would be desirable. I propose instead to explain the contrast in both languages through the scope properties of the imperatives with respect to negation. This leads to a more general reformulation of the distinction between the two types of imperatives, as a distinction between imperatives with scope over negation and
imperatives with scope under negation. In the rest of the paper I show how this new distinction may be applied to other cases of Romance imperatives, as well. A semantic typology of Romance imperatives emerges, accordingly.