Progovac on polarity

Abstract

Over the past two decades, much ink has been spilled in the search for an empirically viable and explanatory account of polarity phenomena. While the fundamental question what is the nature of polarity items and of the principles that determine their distribution?-has yet to receive a fully satisfactory answer, the efforts toward a solution have been fruitful in informing our understanding of the interrelationship of configurational syntax, formal semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. Building on the insights of earlier scholars on the nature of scalar predication (see Fauconnier I975) and the property of monotonicity within the formal theory of generalized quantifiers (see Barwise & Cooper I98I), Ladusaw (I980) was able to identify the set of environments licensing negative polarity items (NPIs) with the semantic notion of downward entailment, the property of licensing inferences from sets to subsets, from the general to the specific, which itself can be seen as a descendant of the scholastic logicians' Dictum de Nullo and downward ('a superiore ad inferius') inference.1 Ladusaw thus provided content to the [+ affective] feature Klima (I964) was forced to associate arbitrarily with NPI-inducing contexts. Positive polarity items (PPIs), receiving shorter shrift in Ladusaw's work, were regarded as being anti-triggered by the same operators that trigger NPIs.