Global positive polarity items and obligatory exhaustivity

By Benjamin Spector. 2014

97 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I argue for a distinction between two types of positive polarity items (PPIs) which has not been recognized so far. While for some PPIs, anti-licensing is a strictly local phenomenon, for other PPIs anti-licensing should be stated as a global condition. I aim to contribute to a principled explanation for the distribution of a significant subset of global PPIs, by relating it to specific semantic properties of the relevant items. More specifically, I argue that PPIs such as soit ... soit ... , quelques and almost trigger obligatory exhaustivity effects and scalar inferences, and that independently motivated constraints regarding the generation of such inferences can account for their distribution. The paper also briefly addresses the case of other global PPIs, e.g., at least , for which a similar account is not straightforwardly available. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.7.11 BibTeX info

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e8d4a11d85ebdad3ca03764a5cdfda597b33a4e

Citations in the corpus

• Children interpret disjunction as conjunction: Consequences for theories of implicature and child development (2016, unknown): “In the adult state complex disjunctions are exclusive (see Spector 2014 for a proposal), but when applied to disjunctive sentences in upward monotone environments, and returns the basic meaning when a disjunction is in the scope of a DE operator or when the strategy applies to other logical…”