Negative structures in neo-standard Italian: non è che (‘it is not that’) + S and mica (‘a crumb’) in comparison

In 1994, in a thought-provoking paper focusing on the developments emerging in the renewed standard norm of Italian, Monica Berretta formulated a few previsions concerning the future admittance into the norm of a number of traits, in her own words, “features, or better, clusters of features that, in today’s Italian, appear more likely to succeed in establishing themselves in the ongoing process of language change, since they are both co-occurrent and typologically coherent [my translation]”. Those features included the incipient emergence of three negative constructions: i) a construction involving the negative operator mica (< Latin ‘crumb’), either in post-verbal position without a pre-verbal negative marker (e.g. Sono mica scemo, ‘I am not a fool’) or ii) in pre-verbal position (e.g. Mica sono scemo, ‘I am not a fool’) and iii) a sentential negation entailing the cleft construction non è che (‘it is not that’) + S (e.g. Questo intervento non è che c’entri molto con il programma del congresso… ‘It is not that this proposal is particularly relevant to the conference’s theme…’), which Berretta considered to be favoured in prognostic terms. In this paper, the occurrences of negative constructions within the KIParla corpus will be compared with the corresponding occurrences in a thirty-hour corpus extracted from the Teche Rai data base [www.teche.rai.it], dating back to the 60s, 70s and 80s of the twentieth century. It will be argued that the cleft construction non è che + S has hitherto prevailed at the expense of the others (involving the use of the negative operator mica), that have specialized to express a few distinctive pragmatic and discursive functions.