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In linguistics, veridicality (from Latin "truthfully said") is a semantic or grammatical assertion of the truth of an utterance.
Merriam-Webster defines "veridical" as truthful, veracious and non illusory. It stems from the Latin "veridicus", composed of Latin verus, meaning "true", and dicere, which means "to say". For example, the statement "Paul saw a snake" asserts belief in the claim, while "Paul did see a snake" is an even stronger assertion of a correct basis for that belief (he perceived an object, believed it to be a snake, and it was in fact a snake).
The formal definition of veridicality views the context as a propositional operator (Giannakidou 1998).
For temporal and aspectual operators, the definition of veridicality is somewhat more complex:
Negation is veridical, though of opposite polarity, sometimes called antiveridical: "Paul didn't see a snake" asserts that the statement "Paul saw a snake" is false. In English, non-indicative moods or irrealis moods are frequently used in a nonveridical sense: "Paul may have seen a snake" and "Paul would have seen a snake" do not assert that Paul actually saw a snake and the second implies that he did not. "Paul would indeed have seen a snake" is veridical, and some languages have separate veridical conditional moods for such cases.[ citation needed ]
Nonveridicality has been proposed to be behind the licensing of polarity items such as the English words any and ever, as an alternative to the influential downward entailment theory (see below) proposed by Ladusaw (1980). Anastasia Giannakidou (1998) argued that various polarity phenomena observed in language are manifestations of the dependency of polarity items to the (non)veridicality of the context of appearance. The (non)veridical dependency may be positive (licensing), or negative (anti-licensing), and arises from the sensitivity semantics of polarity items. Across languages, different polarity items may show sensitivity to veridicality, anti-veridicality, or non-veridicality.
Nonveridical operators typically license the use of polarity items, which in veridical contexts normally is ungrammatical:
All downward entailing contexts are nonveridical. Because of this, theories based on nonveridicality can be seen as extending those based on downward entailment, allowing more cases of polarity item licensing to be explained.
Downward entailment predicts that polarity items will be licensed in the scope of negation, downward entailing quantifiers like few N, at most n N, no N, and the restriction of every:
Quantifiers like exactly three students, nobody but John, and almost nobody are non-monotone (and thus not downward entailing) but nevertheless admit any:
Hardly and barely allow for any despite not being downward entailing.
Polarity items are quite frequent in questions, although questions are not monotone.
Although questions biased towards the negative answer, such as "Do you [even] give a damn about any books?" (tag questions based on negative sentences exhibit even more such bias), can sometimes be seen as downward entailing, this approach cannot account for the general case, such as the above example where the context is perfectly neutral. Neither can it explain why negative questions, which naturally tend to be biased, don't license negative polarity items.
In semantics which treats a question as the set of its true answers, the denotation of a polar question contains two possible answers:
Because disjunction p ∨ q entails neither p nor q, the context is nonveridical, which explains the admittance of any.[ further explanation needed ]
Polarity items appear in future sentences.
According to the formal definition of veridicality for temporal operators, future is nonveridical: that "John will buy a bottle of Merlot" is true now does not entail that "John buys a bottle of Merlot" is true at any instant up to and including now. On the other hand, past is veridical: that "John bought a bottle of Merlot" is true now entails that there is an instant preceding now at which "John buys a bottle of Merlot" is true.
Likewise, nonveridicality of the habitual aspect licenses polarity items.
The habitual aspect is nonveridical because e.g., that "He is usually cheerful" is true over some interval of time does not entail that "He is cheerful" is true over every subinterval of that. This is in contrast to e.g., the progressive aspect, which is veridical and prohibits negative polarity items.
Non-monotone generic sentences accept polarity items.
Modal verbs create generally good environments for polarity items:
Such contexts are nonveridical despite being non-monotone and sometimes even upward entailing ("Mary must tango" entails "Mary must dance").
Imperatives are roughly parallel to modal verbs and intensional contexts in general.
Protasis of conditionals is one of the most common environments for polarity items.
Polarity items are licensed with directive propositional attitudes but not with epistemic ones.
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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.
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