Polarity Sensitivity as Lexical Semantics

Over the last thirty years, the phenomenon of polarity sensitivity has proven both a touchstone and a stumbling block for theories of grammatical representation. Unfortunately, an abundance of scrutiny does not always guarantee an increase in insight. Two major pitfalls are worth mentioning. On the one hand, as the theorist strives for intimations of universality, the complexity and subtle variability of the data are easily underestimated or ignored. On the other hand, when one considers the phenomenon in all its glorious messiness, one may quickly despair of ever finding any general explanation. This paper seeks to negotiate these dangers by considering polarity sensitivity as a problem in lexical semantics. The basic strategy builds on recent analyses by all of which offer lexical semantic explanations for the distribution of polarity sensitive items (PSIs). The goal is to discover what sorts of general properties, beyond their common distributional sensitivities, might unite the large and apparently heterogeneous class of polarity sensitive items. I will argue that such properties are readily available for most, perhaps even all PSIs, and further that the distribution of these forms does indeed arise as a natural consequence of these properties. In particular I suggest that polarity items are conventionally specified for two scalar semantic features, quantitative value and informative value, and that the interaction of these two features in a single lexical form is what creates the effect of polarity sensitivity. The account developed here draws from a large literature on the roles of semantics and pragmatics in negative polarity licensing 1975b, 1980) on polarity and pragmatic scales. Fauconnier held that polarity phenomena are not simply a matter of linguistic representations, but reflect the importance of scalar reasoning as an element of conceptual structure. I concur. I hold that the acceptability of a PSI in a given sentence is determined by the informational value, in context, of the proposition to which the PSI contributes its meaning. PSIs are understood as scalar operators which must be interpreted with respect to an appropriately structured scalar model: they are forms whose lexical semantic-pragmatic content makes them sensitive to scalar inferences. The proposal thus departs from accounts of licensing based on syntactic configurations and also, though more subtly, from those based on semantic