The many careers of negative polarity items
نویسنده
چکیده
Negative polarity items are characterized by their restriction to negative contexts. Ladusaw (1979) proposed that for the most-discussed negative polarity items (NPIs), licensing contexts have to observe the semantic property of being downward entailing (see de Swart 1998, for an accessible introduction). According to a competing analysis, at least some NPIs undergo scalar licensing (Fauconnier 1975). While scalar approaches to NPI licensing have gained in popularity in recent years, there are undoubtedly many NPIs to which the approach cannot be applied. In the present article, I will take a diachronic perspective to discuss the function of scalar NPI licensing for various sub-classes of NPIs as well as for negative polarity sensitivity in general. The scalar analysis of NPI licensing can derive the restriction to downward entailing contexts as an epiphenomenon of independent pragmatic mechanisms which are each attested independently: the capacity to evoke alternatives (ALT) and a scalar interpretation of alternatives
منابع مشابه
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