The currently standard approach to the structure of negation (in Romance) was inaugurated by Pollock (1989), who proposed that negation adverbs such as pas in French fill the Spec position of a NegP projection generated below the I position targeted by the verb. The head of NegP can in turn be filled by a negative clitic like ne in French, whose higher inflectional position depends on movement, i.e. cliticization. In other languages, which include colloquial French, no negative head is present. Belletti (1990) applies the same theory to Italian, which only has a negative head; the latter originates in the Neg position and moves higher as a result of cliticization.

A more complex set of data, involving Northern Italian varieties, is considered by Zanuttini (1997), who proposes that there are several Neg positions. Specifically, a Neg position is generated above I, while below I there are three Neg positions. The inflectional Neg position hosts negative clitics in languages like Italian which do not require a sentential negation adverb. In contrast, languages which require a sentential negation adverb generate it in one of the lower Neg positions; if a clitic combines with the adverb, it is generated in the head of the relevant Neg position and moves to the inflectional domain via cliticization. In other words, for Zanuttini (1997) preverbal clitic negations are associated with two different structures, according to whether they negate alone or combine with a negative adverb.