This article shows that the deontic modals must, should and supposed to are all Positive Polarity Items which can raise in order to avoid being in an anti-licensing environment; it also establishes that should has a dual nature, i.e., it is not just a PPI, but it is also a neg-raising predicate, which can achieve wide scope through a homogeneity inference, and that supposed to, also a PPI, exhibits a neg-raising behavior under certain pragmatic conditions which shed new light on the neg-raising phenomenon.
Linguists often sharply distinguish the different modules that support linguistics competence, e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics. However, recent work has identified phenomena in syntax (polarity sensitivity) and pragmatics (implicatures), which seem to rely on semantic properties (monotonicity). We propose to investigate these phenomena and their connections as a window into the modularity of our linguistic knowledge. We conducted a series of experiments to gather the relevant syntactic, semantic and pragmatic judgments within a single paradigm. The comparison between these quantitative data leads us to four main results. (i) Our results support a departure from one element of the classical Gricean approach, thus helping to clarify and settle an empirical debate. This first outcome also confirms the soundness of the methodology, as the results align with standard contemporary accounts of scalar implicature. (ii) We confirm that the formal semantic notion of monotonicity underlies negative polarity item syntactic acceptability, but (iii) our results indicate that the notion needed is perceived monotonicity. We see results (ii) and (iii) as the main contribution of this study: (ii) provides an empirical interpretation and confirmation of one of the insights of the model-theoretic approach to semantics, while (iii) calls for an incremental, cognitive implementation of the current generalizations. (iv) Finally, our results do not indicate that the relationship between negative polarity item acceptability and monotonicity is mediated by pragmatic features related to scalar implicatures: this tells against elegant attempts to unify polarity sensitivity and scalar implicatures (pioneered by Krifka and Chierchia). These results illustrate a new methodology for integrating theoretically rigorous work in formal semantics with an experimentallygrounded cognitively-oriented view of linguistic competence.
This article offers a unified theory of the licensing of Negative and Positive Polarity Items (PIs), focusing on the acceptability conditions of PPIs of the some-type, and NPIs of the any-type. It argues that licensing has both a syntactic and a semantic component. On the syntactic side, the acceptability of PIs is checked in constituents; in fact, for any given PI, only some constituents, referred to as `domains', are eligible for the evaluation of that PI. The semantic dimension of licensing consists in the sensitivity of PIs to the monotonicity properties of the syntactic environments they find themselves in. Two pieces of evidence support the semantic dimension of what I call the ‘environment-based’ approach defended here: (i.) PIs are subject to flip-flop and (ii.) certain inferences affect their acceptability by modifying the monotonicity of their environment. A third property, called ‘entanglement’ and so far unnoticed, is described: the acceptability of PIs depends on the acceptability of other PIs in the same syntactic environment. The latter property is exploited to determine what semantic property some is sensitive to: it turns out that, contrary to the consensus among researchers, some is acceptable in the complement of the set of environments in which any is acceptable, and vice versa.
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