Global positive polarity items and obligatory exhaustivity

Negative and Positive Polarity Items: Variation, Licensing, and Compositionality

In this chapter, we discuss the distribution and lexical properties of common varieties of negative polarity items (NPIs) and positive polarity items (PPIs). We establish first that NPIs can be licensed in negative, downward entailing, and nonveridical environments. Then we examine if the scalarity approach (originating in Kadmon and Landman 1993) can handle the attested NPI distribution and em...

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...

Polarity Items in Resour

Japanese Negative Polarity Items and Negative Concord

Negative polarity items (NPIs) are a class of expressions whose distribution is restricted to affective contexts, especially to the negative context (Kato (1985)). Examples of the expressions traditionally counted as Japanese negative polarity items are: kessite ('ever'), nannimo ('anything'), daremo (`anyone'), dokomo (`anywhere'), tittomo (`not at all'), and sika ('only') (Ikeya and Kawamori ...