Abstract
In this paper, I argue that pragmatics plays a role in the (anti-)licensing of polarity items in addition to semantic notions such as downward monotonicity and anti-additivity. In the case of positive polarity items (PPIs), I argue that they can co-occur with the anti-additive quantifier no N if intonation or enriched context makes it a contrastive negation or denial. The anti-licensing fails due to a positive implicature (PI) that performs pragmatic licensing and it is to this PI that PPIs contribute their meaning. As for negative polarity items (NPIs), I focus on the case of only that is not straightforwardly downward monotonic but licenses NPIs. Following Horn (2002), I assume that only is semantically conjunctive and that it licenses NPIs by its exclusive entailment that is negative. In addition to Horn’s arguments, I provide further arguments with domain-widening NPIs such as any, ever and minimizers that it is not to the prejacent but to the exclusive entailment that they contribute their domain widening (Kadmon and Landman 1993) function. In other words, the problem of only for NPI theories does not lie in the notion of downward monotonicity but in the compact packaging of two propositions with different monotonicity properties in one single sentence.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful especially to Laurence Horn and Frank Richter for their invaluable comments and also to Regine Eckardt, Sam Featherston, Doris Penka, Janina Radó, Manfred Sailer, Jan-Philipp Soehn for helpful discussions. I thank the audience of my presentation titled “Negative Implicature, Positive Implicature” at the workshop Contrastiveness in Information Structure and/or Scalar Implicatures at CIL18 in Seoul 2008, and the audience of my presentation titled “Universal Quantification and NPI Licensing” at Sinn und Bedeutung 14 in Vienna 2009. Many thanks also to Lucas Ogden for proofreading this paper. All remaining errors and shortcomings are of course my own responsibility. This research was funded by the Landesstiftung Baden-Württemberg and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
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Liu, M. (2017). Negative Entailment, Positive Implicature and Polarity Items. In: Lee, C., Kiefer, F., Krifka, M. (eds) Contrastiveness in Information Structure, Alternatives and Scalar Implicatures. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 91. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10106-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10106-4_11
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