Constructions with negative elements ni kapli and ni razu in Russian

There are many negative polarity items in Russian reinforcing the sentential negation. It may be negative pronouns with affix ni- (ničego, ničut’, nikogo) and quantifiers grammaticalized from smallsize nouns. The paper deals with the new way to express emphatic negation and the process of reinforcement of negation due to including new markers of double negation in Russian. It analyzes the network of constructions with expressions ni kapli and ni razu based on the data from two corpora (General Internet-Corpus of Russian and Russian National Corpus). The paper describes the grammaticalization of the word kaplja ‘drop’ as a part of counting construction. The construction ni razu ne VP combines with a past tense form of a verb and expresses the negation of the experiential meaning. The new construction ni razu / ni kapli ne N arises in non-verbal sentences and expresses emphatic negation of affiliation to a category.