Cuando la negación no tiene polaridad negativa. Incoherencia entre semántica, sintaxis y léxico en las expresiones de negación obligatoria

This investigation discusses the results of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of Spanish and Italian phraseological expressions involving obligatory negation. Obligatorily negated expressions reveal an incoherence between semantics and syntax/lexicon, which deserves a more detailed analysis. The corpus-based investigation here proposed aims to answer the following questions: what is the function of negative polarity in obligatorily negated expressions?; what types of classifications are possible? On the one hand, the quantitative analysis aims at identifying the different syntactic patterns of the obligatory negated sequences. On the other hand, the qualitative investigation explores the function of the negation marker as well as the relationship between the “falseness” of the negation and the degree of lexicalization of a sequence.