Positive polarity items, negation, activated propositions

Abstract

Positive polarity items, negation, activated propositions 1 PIERRE LARRIVÉE AbstractThe received view on the distribution of polarity items is that positive polarity items (PPIs) such as something are found in positive contexts; they are antilicensed by negative contexts, which license negative polarity items ( NPIs) such as anything. PPI some can however be found under the scope of clausemate negation. Such a paradoxical use has been analyzed by Szabolcsi (2004) as a special case of licensing: two negative polarity licensors are required by the internal constitution of some. Some is however shown to occur under the scope of a single clause-mate negative. Single and dual negative environments are argued to depend on the same determinism. This determinism is shown to be activated propositions in the sense of Dryer (1996). Propositions accessible to the hearer characterize the contexts where some and other PPIs come under the scope of clause-mate negation in English and other languages, as demonstrated by the transferable diagnostics proposed. The reason for this correlation is that activation brings the whole proposition into the focus of negation, which does not interact directly with the PPI to produce infelicitous interpretations. A simple and general pragmatic determinism accounts for the marked character of the sequences, that allows a clear distinction to be maintained between licensed NPIs and anti-licensed PPIs. Brought to you by | Penn State -The Pennsylvania State University Authenticated Download Date | 5/26/15 2:58 PM Positive polarity items, negation, activated propositions 871 Szabolcsi (2004)The most common crosslinguistic way to produce the equivalent of an n-word such as nothing is to use an indefinite like something with a sentential negation (Haspelmath 1997; Reesink 2002: 250; van der Auwera et al. 2006: 314 -318). The English way is to propose different formal paradigms. Whereas any is routinely used with negation, this is assumed not to be the case of some.(1) John didn't say anything.(2) *John didn't say something. Some can however be found with negation in certain environments. This is the issue to which Szabolcsi (2004) devotes her attention. These environments include some scoping over negation, as in the following elicitation:(3) John didn't mention something (and that was the rising interest rates).Example (3) suggests that there was something that wasn't mentioned by John. That scope behavior is related by Giannakidou (2008) to the semantic specificity of emphasized some, which is not the case that is the primary object of our consideration here. 2 Our attention is devoted to the cases where some does scope under negation. This obtains when negation is non-clause mate:(4) I don't think that John saw someone.Clause-mate negation focusing on an intervening item is also involved:(5) John didn't offend someone because he was malicious ( but because he was stupid). (not > because > some) (Szabolcsi 2004: 420, example (49)) (6) John didn't say something at every party. (not > every > some) (...

Negation, des-Indefinites in French and Bare Nouns across Languages

“…When PPIs can Scope under Negation There are well-known contexts in which PPIs of the some type can occur in the scope of negation (see in particular Jespersen 1917;Szabolcsi 2004 andLarrivée 2012). Consider (11) from Szabolcsi (2004, (24), (7), and (23)):…”

Metalinguistic negation from an informational perspective

“…Among the various types of Focus (Kiss 1998;Rooth 2016), the case that we are dealing with is contrastive focus. The entity under contrastive Focus is interpreted against a set of alternatives; it is new information against the background of 11 Discourse-old is used as synonymous to given or activated, and refers to the property of a linguistic sequence that represents information made available to the hearer by virtue of explicit use in the antecedent context (explicit activation), or of accommodating constructions or inferential relations (accommodated and inferred activation) (Dryer 1996;Schwenter 2005;Larrivée 2012). While the paucity of MLN in actual usage has not made it easy to conduct corpus studies of it (but see indications in Silvennoinen 2017), the assumption that it refers to an explicitly used sequence is supported by the following, where only the explicitly discourse-old case is fully acceptable (the acceptability judgements characterising the response in relation to the initial assertion).…”

Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

“…DN should therefore be a marked option correlating to particular triggers, hypothesised to be an IS configuration on the basis of existing studies and available observations. IS is here defined as the status of information conveyed by linguistic material as to whether it is accessible to the hearer at that point of the discourse Schwenter 2005;Larrivée 2012). Because the impact of IS configuration on DN is what is tested, I select sequences believed to be strongly biased in favour of DN.…”

“…Choice of not was motivated by the intention to exclude dialectal or register varieties where contracted negative and NC would be expected to be preponderant 8 are explicitly activated. 8 involve a correction, that accommodates the rejected proposition as discourse-old (Larrivée 2012). The 3 occurrences that are not explicitly activated distribute with modal verbs as in (24), and in 1 other contexts (25).…”