When 'never' meant 'ever: the polarity item 'nunca' in Old Portuguese

In European Portuguese, nunca ‘never’ is traditionally classified as a temporal adverb and it can convey sentential negation on its own, therefore behaving as a strong negative polarity item (NPI). Nevertheless, in early stages of the language we find nunca with a non-negative interpretation, in contexts that are considered ungrammatical in contemporary Portuguese. Unlike negative indefinites that started as weak NPIs and became inherently negative, nunca was already a strong negative polarity item in 13th century Portuguese. In this article I will show that, apart from the strong NPI nunca, there was also an ambiguous item nunca that corresponded to a modal polarity item. In the Romance context, items originating from Latin numquam also unfold into ambiguous items with different polarity. In Portuguese, however, ambiguity was not preserved. The evolution of nunca reinforces the idea that Portuguese is the most innovative of Romance languages regarding the outcomes of polarity items.