In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG.
The linguistic environment in which a polarity item appears is a licensing context. In the simplest case, an affirmative statement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI. However, there are many complications, and not all polarity items of a particular type have the same licensing contexts.
As examples of polarity items, consider the English lexical items somewhat and at all, as used in the following sentences:
As can be seen, somewhat is licensed by the affirmative environment of sentence (1), but it is forbidden (anti-licensed) by the negative environment of sentence (4). [1] It can therefore be considered to be a positive polarity item (PPI). On the other hand, at all is licensed by the negative environment of sentence (2), but anti-licensed by the positive environment of sentence (3), and is therefore considered a negative polarity item (NPI).
Because standard English does not have negative concord, that is, double negatives are not used to intensify each other, the language makes frequent use of certain NPIs that correspond in meaning to negative items, and can be used in the environment of another negative. For example, anywhere is an NPI corresponding to the negative nowhere, as used in the following sentences:
Note that double-negative constructions like I was not going nowhere take on an opposing meaning in formal usage, but that this is not necessarily the case in colloquial contexts and in various lects, which parallels other languages which have negative concord. Anywhere, like most of the other NPIs listed below, is also used in other senses where it is not an NPI, as in I would go anywhere with you.
See also English grammar § Negation, and Affirmation and negation § Multiple negation.
The actual set of contexts that license particular polarity items is not as easily defined as a simple distinction between affirmative and negative sentences. Baker [2] noted that double negation may provide an acceptable context for positive polarity items:
However, licensing contexts can take many forms besides simple negation/affirmation. To complicate matters, polarity items appear to be highly idiosyncratic, each with its own set of licensing contexts.
Early discussion of polarity items can be found in the work of Otto Jespersen and Edward Klima. Much of the research on polarity items has centered around the question of what creates a negative context. In the late 1970s, William Ladusaw (building on work by Gilles Fauconnier) discovered that most English NPIs are licensed in downward entailing environments. This is known as the Fauconnier–Ladusaw hypothesis. A downward entailing environment, however, is not a necessary condition for an NPI to be licensed—they may be licensed by some non-monotone (and thus not downward entailing) contexts, like "exactly N," as well.
Nor is a downward entailing environment a sufficient condition for all negative polarity items, as first pointed out by Zwarts (1981) for Dutch "ook maar."
Licensing contexts across languages include the scope of n-words (negative particles, negative quantifiers), the antecedent of conditionals, questions, the restrictor of universal quantifiers, non-affirmative verbs (doubt), adversative predicates (be surprised), negative conjunctions (without), comparatives and superlatives, too-phrases, negative predicates (unlikely), some subjunctive complements, some disjunctions, imperatives, and others (finally, only). Given that many of these environments are not strictly downward entailing, alternative licensing conditions have been proposed building on concepts such as Strawson entailment and nonveridicality (proposed by Zwarts and Giannakidou).
Different NPIs may be licensed by different expressions. Thus, while the NPI anything is licensed by the downward entailing expression at most two of the visitors, the idiomatic NPI not lift a finger (known as a minimizer) is not licensed by the same expression.
While NPIs have been discovered in many languages, their distribution is subject to substantial cross-linguistic variation; this aspect of NPIs is currently the subject of ongoing research in cross-linguistic semantics. [3]
A double negative is a construction occurring when two forms of grammatical negation are used in the same sentence. This is typically used to convey a different shade of meaning from a strictly positive sentence. Multiple negation is the more general term referring to the occurrence of more than one negative in a clause. In some languages, double negatives cancel one another and produce an affirmative; in other languages, doubled negatives intensify the negation. Languages where multiple negatives affirm each other are said to have negative concord or emphatic negation. Portuguese, Persian, French, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish, Old English, Italian, Afrikaans, and Hebrew are examples of negative-concord languages. This is also true of many vernacular dialects of modern English. Chinese, Latin, German, Dutch, Japanese, Swedish and modern Standard English are examples of languages that do not have negative concord. Typologically, negative concord occurs in a minority of languages.
Linguistic entailments are entailments which arise in natural language. If a sentence A entails a sentence B, sentence A cannot be true without B being true as well. For instance, the English sentence "Pat is a fluffy cat" entails the sentence "Pat is a cat" since one cannot be a fluffy cat without being a cat. On the other hand, this sentence does not entail "Pat chases mice" since it is possible for a cat to not chase mice.
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms, typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered.
In linguistic semantics, a downward entailing (DE) propositional operator is one that constrains the meaning of an expression to a lower number or degree than would be possible without the expression. For example, "not," "nobody," "few people," "at most two boys." Conversely, an upward-entailing operator constrains the meaning of an expression to a higher number or degree, for example "more than one." A context that is neither downward nor upward entailing is non-monotone, such as "exactly five."
Polarity may refer to:
This article provides a grammar sketch of Basque grammar. Basque is the language of the Basque people of the Basque Country or Euskal Herria, which borders the Bay of Biscay in Western Europe.
In linguistics, a sentence function refers to a speaker's purpose in uttering a specific sentence, phrase, or clause. Whether a listener is present or not is sometimes irrelevant. It answers the question: "Why has this been said?" The five basic sentence forms in English are the declarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperative and the optative. These correspond to the discourse functionsstatement, question, exclamation, and command respectively. The different forms involve different combinations in word order, the addition of certain auxiliaries or particles, or other times by providing a special form. There is no clear one-to-one correspondence between the forms/structures and their discourse functions. For example, a declarative form can be used to ask a question, and interrogative form can be used to make a statement.
In pragmatics, scalar implicature, or quantity implicature, is an implicature that attributes an implicit meaning beyond the explicit or literal meaning of an utterance, and which suggests that the utterer had a reason for not using a more informative or stronger term on the same scale. The choice of the weaker characterization suggests that, as far as the speaker knows, none of the stronger characterizations in the scale holds. This is commonly seen in the use of 'some' to suggest the meaning 'not all', even though 'some' is logically consistent with 'all'. If Bill says 'I have some of my money in cash', this utterance suggests to a hearer that Bill does not have all his money in cash.
Yes and no, or similar word pairs, are expressions of the affirmative and the negative, respectively, in several languages, including English. Some languages make a distinction between answers to affirmative versus negative questions and may have three-form or four-form systems. English originally used a four-form system up to and including Early Middle English. Modern English uses a two-form system consisting of yes and no. It exists in many facets of communication, such as: eye blink communication, head movements, Morse code, and sign language. Some languages, such as Latin, do not have yes-no word systems.
Frans Zwarts was the rector magnificus of the University of Groningen (2002–2011) and a linguist and professor in the Department of Dutch Language and Culture with a specialty in semantics. His first degree was in general linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, and his PhD was completed at the University of Groningen in 1986 with the dissertation Categoriale grammatica en algebraïsche semantiek; een onderzoek naar negatie en polariteit in het Nederlands. He was appointed professor of Dutch linguistics in Groningen in 1987, and was scientific director of the research school (onderzoekschool) Behavioral & Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN) from 1999 until 2002, when he was elected rector magnificus. He is the president of the National Dyslexia Commission and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Positive anymore is the use of the adverb anymore in an affirmative context. While any more is typically a negative/interrogative polarity item used in negative, interrogative, or hypothetical contexts, speakers of some dialects of English use it in positive or affirmative contexts, with a meaning similar to nowadays or from now on. The difference between negative anymore and positive anymore can be characterized as follows:
In linguistics, veridicality is a semantic or grammatical assertion of the truth of an utterance.
In linguistics and grammar, affirmation and negation are ways in which grammar encodes positive and negative polarity into verb phrases, clauses, or other utterances. An affirmative (positive) form is used to express the validity or truth of a basic assertion, while a negative form expresses its falsity. For example, the affirmative sentence "Joe is here" asserts that it is true that Joe is currently located near the speaker. Conversely, the negative sentence "Joe is not here" asserts that it is not true that Joe is currently located near the speaker.
Henriëtte Elisabeth de Swart is a Dutch linguist.
Anastasia Giannakidou is the Frank J. McLoraine Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. She is the founder and inaugural director of the Center for Hellenic Studies at the University of Chicago, and co-director of Center for Gesture, Sign and Language. She is best known for her work on veridicality, polarity phenomena, modal sentences, and the interactions of tense and modality. She holds a Research Associate position at Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, is a faculty fellow at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, and is an associate member of Bilingualism Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In linguistics, negative raising is a phenomenon that concerns the raising of negation from the embedded or subordinate clause of certain predicates to the matrix or main clause. The higher copy of the negation, in the matrix clause, is pronounced; but the semantic meaning is interpreted as though it were present in the embedded clause.
In linguistics, a minimizer is a word or phrase that denotes a very small quantity which is used to reinforce negation. For example, red cent is a minimizer in the sentence "I'm not paying him a red cent".
Yael Sharvit is an American linguist who is Professor of Linguistics at UCLA. She specializes in semantics and the syntax-semantics interface.
In formal semantics, Strawson entailment is a variant of the concept of entailment which is insensitive to presupposition failures. Formally, a sentence P Strawson-entails a sentence Q iff Q is always true when P is true and Qs presuppositions are satisfied. For example, "Maria loves every cat" Strawson-entails "Maria loves her cat" because Maria could not love every cat without loving her own, assuming that she has one. This would not be an ordinary entailment, since the first sentence could be true while the second is undefined on account of a presupposition failure; loving every cat would not guarantee that she owns a cat.