Negative Entailment, Positive Implicature and Polarity Items

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that pragmatics plays a role in the (anti-)licensing of polarity items in addition to semantic notions such as downward monotonicity and anti-additivity. In the case of positive polarity items (PPIs), I argue that they can co-occur with the anti-additive quantifier no N if intonation or enriched context makes it a contrastive negation or denial. The anti-licensing fails due to a positive implicature (PI) that performs pragmatic licensing and it is to this PI that PPIs contribute their meaning. As for negative polarity items (NPIs), I focus on the case of only that is not straightforwardly downward monotonic but licenses NPIs. Following Horn (2002), I assume that only is semantically conjunctive and that it licenses NPIs by its exclusive entailment that is negative. In addition to Horn’s arguments, I provide further arguments with domain-widening NPIs such as any, ever and minimizers that it is not to the prejacent but to the exclusive entailment that they contribute their domain widening (Kadmon and Landman 1993) function. In other words, the problem of only for NPI theories does not lie in the notion of downward monotonicity but in the compact packaging of two propositions with different monotonicity properties in one single sentence.