This paper brings to bear primary fieldwork data from Gallo on negation and polarity related issues. We defend two correlated
proposals. (i) The negative markers
pas/pouint in Gallo are not inherently negative, but rather merely signal the
presence of abstract semantic negation in their clause. (ii) In (at least) the Morbihan dialect of Gallo, the negative markers
pas/pouint come in two variants: a plain and a
scalar variant, both of which enter into a
Negative Concord relation with abstract semantic negation. The scalar NPI variant corresponding to
aoqhun across
other Gallo dialects, or to
aucun in Standard French, is
pas/pouint aoqhun and it is the negator
(minimizer)
pas/pouint that provides the necessary scalarity component characteristic of N(P)Is (formally the
scalar feature [+σ]) to the plain indefinite
aoqhun. As a corollary, adapting
Labelle & Espinal (2014), the shift from indefinite to (N)PI involves transfer of a scalar feature from a
minimizer to an indefinite.