Not-ACC-ing and not-NOM-that constructions: A Comparative Study of English and Italian Expletive Negation

This work describes and compares a relatively new construction in their Italian and English vari- ants, namely not-NOM-that constructions and not-ACC-ing constructions respectively: Non io che perdo le chiavi di casa per la seconda volta quest’anno / Not me losing my housekeys twice this year. Despite the presence of a negative marker, these sentences retain an affirmative meaning, expressing irony, sarcasm, or self-deprecation (rephrased as ‘It is ironic and surprising that I lost my housekeys twice this year’). They are predominantly used by younger generations on social media and in informal speech. We compare the English construction with its Italian counterpart, focusing on their syntax. More specifically, we provide an in-depth structural analysis of English not-ACC- ing constructions claiming that they contain a focalized Acc-ing construction (in the sense of Lowe 2019) and Expletive Negation (following Greco 2020). We also claim that the main structural and semantic properties of Italian not-NOM-that constructions also derive from: (i) the presence of a high negation merged in the CP layer, (ii) the focalization of a whole chunk of structure.