Abstract
This article shows that the deontic modals must, should and supposed to are all Positive Polarity Items which can raise in order to avoid being in an anti-licensing environment; it also establishes that should has a dual nature, i.e., it is not just a PPI, but it is also a neg-raising predicate, which can achieve wide scope through a homogeneity inference, and that supposed to, also a PPI, exhibits a neg-raising behavior under certain pragmatic conditions which shed new light on the neg-raising phenomenon. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.8.4 BibTeX info
Highlights
Among deontic modal verbs, some, e.g., have to and required to, have obligatory narrow scope under a clausemate negation
This article shows that we do not need to postulate a different basegeneration position to account for the variation across the aforementioned verbs, for they are all generated lower than the position that hosts negation; the three wide scope takers are Positive Polarity Items (PPIs), which explains why they are not normally interpreted with narrow scope under a clausemate negation, and they are able to scope out (I call them mobile PPIs): they can raise out of an anti-licensing environment, such as the scope of a clausemate negation, their observed wide scope
Should and supposed to are mobile PPIs and that should is a neg-raiser, while supposed to exhibits the neg-raising behavior only in certain dialects and provided that the opinionatedness of some individual is assumed in the context of utterance. (The typology is presented in Table 1.) The examination of supposed to favors a pragmatic approach to neg-raising
Summary
Some, e.g., have to and required to, have obligatory narrow scope under a clausemate negation. It is possible to distinguish neg-raising — neg-raisers, e.g., think, do not move past negation but achieve semantic wide scope through an excluded middle or homogeneity inference, see Gajewski 2007 — from PPIhood, and to establish, as is done for the first time in this article, the polarity sensitivity of must, should and supposed to. Another fact is established: should has a dual nature, i.e., it is both a neg-raiser and a mobile PPI; and in a certain dialect of English, the PPI supposed to is a neg-raiser, but a part-time one. The PPI supposed to exhibits, in the dialect of certain speakers, an even subtler character (Section 5): it is a neg-raiser, but manifests this property only when certain pragmatic conditions are met
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