Additive and aspectual anche in Old Italian

In Modern Italian (MI), negative additives (e.g. neanche ‘neither/not even’) contain a negative morpheme ne- and obey negative concord (NC) with sentential negation. In Old Italian (OI), negative additives such as neanche are not attested. Instead, a non-negative additive, anche, combines with a negative marker: e.g. né/non…anche (‘neither/not even’). In OI (i) anche can be used both in negative, and positive contexts; (ii) anche can function either as an aspectual marker (= ‘(not) yet’), or as an additive focalizer (= ‘neither/not even’); (iii) different syntactic positions mirror its different interpretations. We suggest that the grammaticalization of neanche originates from the contexts in which additive anche occurs immediately right adjacent to the negative disjunction né (i.e. né + anche > neanche).