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). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between vagueness and adverbial polarity items (PIs) and argue that there are two types of adverbial PIs in Japanese, absolute and relative, which is similar to the case with gradable adjectives (e.g. Kennedy and McNally 2005; Kennedy 2007). Mattaku is absolute in the sense that it denotes the minimum endpoint of a scale, while zenzen is relative in the sense that it denotes that the actual degree is ‘far removed’ from the contextually determined standard. This paper shows that the lexical semantics of PIs is diverse (Giannakidou 1998, 2006; Yoshimura 2007).