Negative polarity and grammatical representation

Linebarger, Marcia C.

doi:10.1007/bf00584131

Cited by 350 publications

(162 citation statements)

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“…Formally, a node A c-commands another node B if, and only if, A does not dominate B; and every node X that dominates A also dominates B (Reinhart, 1981); a node P dominates another node Q if P occurs at a depth higher than Q and a path exists from P to Q (the depth of a node from the root is the number of vertices traversed exactly once from root to node). As an illustration, consider Example 1a; here, No man c-commands ever, but a beard does not: Much controversy surrounds the precise constraints operating on negative polarity licensors (e.g., see Baker, 1970;Chierchia, 2006;Fauconnier, 1975aFauconnier, , 1975bGiannakidou, 1998;Horn, 2001;Israel, 2006;Krifka, 1995;Ladusaw, 1980;Linebarger, 1987;Szabolcsi, 2004;van der Wouden, 1997). However, for the above examples, it can be argued that 1b, 1c, 2b, and 2c violate the c-command constraint on NPIs.…”

Section: Polarity Licensing Dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

et al. 2008

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A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture. To demonstrate this, this article investigates an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirms a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: Partialcue matches-which constitute a kind of similarity-based interference-can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.

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Section: Polarity Licensing Dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

et al. 2008

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“…The telling configurations (9b) and (10a) violate a familiar constraint known as the immediate scope constraint (Linebarger 1987, Guerzoni 2006 or a generalized version of it below (Kim and Sells 2007: 88).…”

Section: Non-anti-additive Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indeterminate NPIs and Scope

Shimoyama

2015

SALT

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“…); see e.g. Ladusaw (1979Ladusaw ( , 1980, Linebarger (1980Linebarger ( , 1987, Progovac (1994), Giannakidou (1998 and onwards), and Horn (2002) for different proposals along this line. As yes/no-questions and conditionals may host polarity items even in the absence of an overt licensor, the search has been directed at finding an underlying syntactic/semantic licensing feature common to both negative and non-negative licensing contexts.…”

Section: Bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluability – An alternative approach to polarity sensitivity

Brandtler¹

2013

Beyond 'Any' and 'Ever'

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Based on Brandtler (2012), this paper argues that polarity items are sensitive to evaluability, a concept that refers to the possibility of accepting or rejecting an utterance as true in a communicative exchange. The main distinction is made between evaluable and non-evaluable utterances. The evaluable category comprises any clause that asserts, presupposes or entails the truth of an affirmative or a negative proposition. In contrast, the non-evaluable category contains clauses that do not assert, presuppose or entail the truth of an affirmative or a negative proposition.According to the Evaluability Hypothesis, non-evaluable environments are natural hosts for both NPIs and PPIs. Hence, the occurrence of polarity items in non-evaluable clauses does not require formal licensing, and this is the reason we find both PPIs and weak NPIs in yes/noquestions and conditionals. Evaluable clauses, in contrast, are restricted environments and may only host polarity items that are formally (i.e. syntactically) licensed. Hence, NPIs require the presence of a licensing element, and PPIs require the absence of such elements. This analysis leads to an important change of perspective, as the occurrence of polarity items in negative and affirmative sentences becomes the marked, or exceptional, case.

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Negative polarity and grammatical representation

Cited by 350 publications

References 13 publications

Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

Indeterminate NPIs and Scope

Evaluability – An alternative approach to polarity sensitivity

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