The felicity of contrast and parallel relations as well as structures such as ellipsis are in part dependent on the presence of lexical elements contrasting or sharing. Traditional dictionaries and lexical resources like WordNet code information about antonyms, yet this is often not the type of polarity found in real contrast or parallel examples. It is not yet clear how negative or positive po...

Given a graph G = (V,E), an even kernel is a nonempty independent subset V ′ ⊆ V , such that every vertex of G is adjacent to an even number (possibly 0) of vertices in V ′. It is proved that the question of whether a graph has an even kernel is NP-complete. The motivation stems from combinatorial game theory. It is known that this question is polynomial if G is bipartite. We also prove that th...

We discuss a phenomenon that appears when ‘even’ occurs in questions. Specifically, an inference of what we call ‘‘extreme ignorance’’ is projected onto the speaker. We argue that this effect arises when the known unlikelihood ‘even’ focuses an entire question, resulting in the focused question being the least likely to be asked. Specific implicatures then conspire to bring about the inference ...