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The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 2001 as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs.* Klima's (1964) seminal work on English negation. In earlier works the main goal has been to describe the conditions under which English PIs like any and ever appear, but recent crosslinguistic studies have extended the empirical domain of polarity and made obvious a complexity that in the earlier works went unnoticed. We now know that any is one of many PI paradigms in the world's languages, and that the various PIs are not subject to identical distributional restrictions. At the same time, in order to predict whether an expression can act as a licenser, we have come to expect a coherent and relatively homogenous characterization of the set of expressions that allow PIs within and across languages. POLARITY-ITEM LICENSING AND THE PROBLEM OF only AND EMOTIVE FACTIVES. The licensing of POLARITY ITEMS (PIs) is a central issue in linguistic theory, one that has received considerable attention sinceLadusaw 1979 established that we can indeed unify the class of PIs licensers in terms of a semantic property they share. This property is identified as DOWNWARD ENTAILMENT (DE), and a licensing condition like 1 is proposed.(1) Ladusaw's (1979) licensing condition ␣ is a trigger for negative polarity items in its scope iff ␣ is downward entailing.

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Pesetsky's (1987) ''aggressively non-D-linked'' wh-phrases (like who the hell; hereinafter, wh-the-hell phrases) exhibit a variety of syntactic and semantic peculiarities, including the fact that they cannot occur in situ and do not support nonecho readings when occurring in root multiple questions. While these are familiar from the literature (albeit less than fully understood), our focus will be on a previously unnoted property of wh-the-hell phrases: the fact that their distribution (in single wh-questions) matches that of polarity items (PIs). We lay out the key data supporting this claim, embed the PI nature of wh-the-hell phrases in the theory of polarity developed in Giannakidou 1998Giannakidou , 1999Giannakidou , 2001, and establish the link between the lexical content of these phrases and their PI status by identifying wh-the-hell as a dependent PI. We subsequently exploit the PI status of wh-the-hell to explain the more familiar puzzles mentioned above, showing that these are not peculiarities specific to wh-the-hell but manifestations of the general properties of the class of PIs that wh-the-hell belongs to. The syntactic aspects of the polarity analysis of wh-the-hell are shown to have important consequences for the fundamental properties of wh-movement in English.