Non-monotonic Negativity

Non-monotonic Negativity Sumiyo Nishiguchi Department of English Linguistics, Graduate School of Letters, Osaka University Department of Linguistics, UCLA 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90024-1543 sue westgate@nifty.com Abstract The main aim of this paper is to provide a new analysis of licensers of negative polarity items (NPIs). The problems with Fauconnier-Ladusaw's downward entailment analysis have been argued since Linebarger (1980). I will show that there exists a class of weak NPI licensers characterized by non-monotonicity and exclusivity. Weak negation, which is monotone decreasing, has been known to license weak NPIs such as any and ever (Zwarts 1993). However, non-monotonic items also trigger these wideners. Exclusivity or uniqueness characterizes non-monotonic operators, such as only, exactly n, superlatives, ordinal numerals, the determiner the, generic NPs, and also if and only if clauses, hope, happy, glad and others. Many of them function as generalized quantifiers which prohibit either downward or upward entailment. As Jespersen (1917) traces the origin of NPIs back to the strengthening of negation, non-monotonic contexts also favor strengthening by these words. We begin by considering the limited distribution of polarity items. The following section presents shortcomings of previous analyses, and then, non-monotonic expressions and their exclusivity are discussed. 1� Introduction: Licensing Negative Polarity Items Certain lexical items have been known to appear only in negative contexts. These, having been called negative polarity items (henceforth, NPIs), are such as any, anything, anymore, ever, at all, whatsoever, budge an inch, care to VP, and bother V-ing. (1)� Not: a. I didn't realize that he admired her at all. b. *He admired her at all. (Klima 1964:282) (2)� None: a. None of the rivals said anything whatsoever. b. *Some of the rivals said anything whatsoever. (Hoeksema 1986a:35) The distribution of NPIs is not limited to explicit negatives. Various contexts accommodate NPIs. (3)� At most: a. At most three women have ever loved him. b. ?At least three women have ever loved him. (ibid.) (4)� Every: a. Every student who had ever read anything about phrenology attended the lecture. b. * Some student who had ever read anything about phrenology attended the lecture. (Ladusaw 1980:3) 204 (5) Only: a. Only Bill had ever read anything about phrenology. b. *Even Bill had ever read anything about phrenology. A number of scholars have attempted to capture the common feature of NPI licensers from semantic (Ladusaw 1979, von Fintel 1999), syntactic (Progovac 1988, 1992, 1994), pragmatic (Yoshimura 1992), syntactic-pragmatic (Linebarger 1980), and semantic-pragmatic (Giannakidou 1998) viewpoints. None of them, however, are without shortcomings, as we will examine in the next section. 2 Previous Analyses and Problems 2.1 Ladusaw's DE Analysis and Counterexamples Downward-Entailingness, proposed by Ladusaw (1979), is valid in characterizing numerous NPI licensers. It, however, is not exempt from counterexamples (Linebarger 1980). (6)� A negative-polarity item is acceptable only if it is interpreted in the scope l of a downward-entailing expression. (Ladusaw 1980:13) A monotone decreasing (DE) scope corresponds to polarity sensitivity: (7) Every: ,I,MON2 .TRIGGER3 a. Every man walks.� —0,� Every father walks. b. Every …

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