Volume 56, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Positive Polarity: Data and Theory

Polarity sensitivity has been an established key topic of linguistic research for more than half a century. The study of polarity phenomena can be extremely revealing about the internal structure of a language, as they usually involve an interaction at the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. In the past, most attention was paid to negative polarity items. However, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in positive polarity items. As a continuation of this trend, this issue collects four papers dedicated to positive polarity items, which enrich the empirical domain with novel observations from different languages and appeal to diverse theoretical concepts such as scalarity and presupposition in their modeling of positive polarity. The results show that positive polarity is a distributional phenomenon that has different sources and most likely cannot be modeled in a unifying way, although there may be subsets of positive polarity items that allow unifying accounts.

This paper discusses a class of so-called “marked” or “modal” indefinites in Romance, (e.g., Romanian un NP oarecare , Italian un NP qualunque , French quelque N ), which have been shown to display the locality, shielding and rescuing effects familiar from the study of positive polarity items (PPIs) like someone (e.g., Săvescu-Ciucivara 2007, Oarecare indefinites are not just any indefinites. In Gabriela Alboiu, Andrei Avram, Larisa Avram & Daniela Isac (eds.), Pitar Moș: A building with a view: Papers in honour of Alexandra Cornilescu , 205–225. Bucharest: Editura Universității din București; Jayez and Tovena 2007, Evidentiality and determination. In Atle Grønn (ed.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, 271–286. Oslo: Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo; Chierchia 2013, Logic in grammar . Oxford: Oxford University Press). Taking Romanian as a case study, I show that in positive contexts, these indefinites exhibit properties (obligatory non-specificity, free choice inferences) that set them apart from someone -PPIs and make them very similar to free choice indefinites. Adopting the framework in Chierchia (2013), we account for the interpretation of indefinites like un NP oarecare by assuming they activate scalar and domain alternatives. The computation of these alternatives is argued to be responsible for the observed interpretation and interaction with negation (as well as other positive polarity features). The proposed account emphasizes the connection between free choice and positive polarity and suggests that positive polarity behavior stems from more than one source.

This paper investigates the Italian element già ‘already’ under negation in various contexts, including questions. The occurrence of già under negation in questions is unexpected because già cannot be licensed in declarative sentences with sentential negation (It. * Non ho già fatto colazione . literally ‘I did not have breakfast already.’). The empirical contribution of this paper is to provide a corpus analysis and to describe the contexts in which già can appear under negation. The main research questions of this paper are as follows: (i) how do we account for the distribution and the licensing conditions of già under negation? and (ii) how is the meaning of già related to its distribution? This paper shows that some syntactic restrictions are responsible for the distribution of già under negation, and that in contexts where già appears under negation in questions or conditionals, it is not interpreted under the direct scope of negation.

This paper presents Dutch and English predicates that behave as positive polarity items and provides a partial, semantically-grounded classification of this group of PPIs. The items are studied from the perspective of anti-licensing behavior (by negation, either locally or long-distance, in questions, and by weakly negative quantifiers such as little and few ). Predicates, unlike quantifiers, do not have wide scope readings (which allow quantificational PPIs such as somebody to appear in the syntactic scope of negation). Using a mixture of corpus data and introspective judgments, we show that anti-licensing among PPIs is not uniform (mirroring earlier results on NPIs which likewise show considerable variation). Rescuing contexts are likewise shown to differ among PPIs. Some of the PPI predicates show complex interaction with illocutionary force (especially mandative force), and others with differences between presupposed and asserted propositions. High degree predicates, finally, point toward the existence of connections between the marking of degree and positive polarity. PPI status is argued to be the result of a complex interaction between the effects of negation and other nonveridical operators, and other semantic factors, which differ among subclasses of PPIs. Anti-licensing by weak negation correlates fairly well with anti-licensing by long-distance negation, a finding which is (partly) in line with a recent proposal by Spector (2014, Global positive polarity items and obligatory exhaustivity. Semantics and Pragmatics 7(11). 1–61) concerning global PPIs. However, we find there to be more variation among the PPIs studied here than the classification of Spector (2014) or any binary classification stipulates.

This paper discusses the German idiomatic expression einen/den Teufel tun ‘do a/the devil’ which is used for emphatic rejection. It is shown that this expression is a PPI, as it cannot occur in the scope of negation. I will motivate that the asserted content of the expression is negation. With German being a non-negative concord language, the co-occurrence of several expressions of negation is usually avoided. This typological fact leads to two different judgement patterns for sentences with einen/den Teufel tun and a negation marker. The expression also contributes a conventional implicature that expresses an attitude of the subject. This conventional implicature shows an interaction with negation similar to that of evaluative adverbs. I will argue that the PPI-hood of the considered expression is fully reducible to its properties as an idiomatic negation marker in a non-negative concord language and its multi-dimensional semantics.