Abstract
The paper discusses hedges such as that I know of in The train is not late, that I know of, which form a hitherto undocumented polarity sensitive construction that can be found in a number of European languages. Internally, they resist negation, in ways reminiscent of parenthetical as-clauses, and other parenthetical constructions. On the basis of a small corpus of English and Dutch occurrences of the hedge construction, I outline the distributional properties and internal structure. A number of restrictions are uncovered regarding the subject of the hedge clause (in particular: universally quantified and indefinite subjects are ruled out, second person subjects are limited to questions), which point to a strong pragmatic effect of point of view, but still require further study. The polarity sensitive status of the hedge is derived from the interaction of strong verbs (know, be aware of, etc.) and the pragmatic requirement of hedges that they tone down a statement. Together, these require that the hedge be within the scope of negation.
Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the Crisco workshop The pragmatics of grammar: negation and polarity, held in Caen, May 19–20, 2015. I thank the audience and the organizer, Pierre Larrivée, for comments and discussion. An additional debt of gratitude is owed to two anonymous referees for this journal.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Explaining asymmetries in number marking: Singulatives, pluratives, and usage frequency
- The typology of property words in Oceanic languages
- Not that I know of: A polarity-sensitive construction
- Melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German spontaneous speech
- Why is children’s interpretation of doubly quantified sentences non-isomorphic?
- On the interplay of object animacy and verb type during sentence comprehension in German: ERP evidence from the processing of transitive dative and accusative constructions
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Explaining asymmetries in number marking: Singulatives, pluratives, and usage frequency
- The typology of property words in Oceanic languages
- Not that I know of: A polarity-sensitive construction
- Melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German spontaneous speech
- Why is children’s interpretation of doubly quantified sentences non-isomorphic?
- On the interplay of object animacy and verb type during sentence comprehension in German: ERP evidence from the processing of transitive dative and accusative constructions