This article reviews the historical trajectory of nonada, a noun and quantifier of negative existentiality well spread in the Golden Age language. Firstly I track the syntactic-semantic contexts that allowed the combination of the adverb no(n) and the indefinites ninguno and nada, and then I present a diachronic analysis of the quantitative progression, grammatical behavior, meanings and social and textual distribution of the new element nonada. The corde shows that no(n) nada and no(n)nada (both representations were used without distinction) is documented with all its values in the 15th century. As nouns, nada and nonada specialize in different meanings, but they always keep a common space of use as free sequences and elements pertaining to idioms. This concurrence may be the reason why nonada (which never had an exclusive space) initiated an irreversible retreat in the second half of the 17th century, even though this process was scarcely documented in lexicographic repertoires. With regard to the limited temporal vigency of this element, it should be also noted that nonada had little presence in American Spanish.
Keywords:
Medieval Castilian, Classic Spanish, indefinites of existentiality, negation, nonada
Pérez-Salazar, C. (2014). No(n) nada, non(n)ada. From medieval legal texts to Golden Age literature. Boletín De Filología, 49(1), Pág. 59 – 92. Retrieved from https://revistachilenahumanidades.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/32419
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