Polarity Items in Basque

Polarity Items in Resour

Vagueness and Adverbial Polarity Items

However, mattaku and zenzen are not uniform in terms of scalarity and polarity. In sentence (1), zenzen is natural in a situation where the speaker actually has a little money, whereas mattaku is unacceptable in such a situation. Descriptively, we can summarize this distinction as follows: ‘Zenzen not P’ implies ‘a little P’ but ‘mattaku not P’ entails ‘completely not P.’ (P= gradable predicate...

Compromising Positions and Polarity Items

This paper looks at two theories of polarity licensing that utilize a downward entailment relation (DE) in their explanations of the polarity item distribution question. I illustrate that various compromising adverbs such as pretty much, virtually, practically, basically, etc., disrupt downward entailment yet do not interfere with polarity licensing, which raises problems for theories depending...

Licensing German Negative Polarity Items in LTAG

Our paper aims at capturing the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) within lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). The condition under which an NPI can occur in a sentence is for it to be in the scope of a negation with no quantifiers scopally intervening. We model this restriction within a recent framework for LTAG semantics based on semantic unification. The proposed analysis pr...

A Multilingual Database of Polarity Items

This paper presents three electronic collections of polarity items: (i) negative polarity items in Romanian, (ii) negative polarity items in German, and (iii) positive polarity items in German. The presented collections are a part of a linguistic resource on lexical units with highly idiosyncratic occurrence patterns. The motivation for collecting and documenting polarity items was to provide a...