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On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2024
Abstract
This article aims to better understand how Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) come into existence and how they change over time. It argues that an expression can become an NPI if its semantics makes it pragmatically useful in negative or downward entailing contexts, often because the meaning leads to pragmatic strength, but sometimes because its semantics leads to pragmatic attenuation. Special attention is given to two patterns involving pragmatic strength that can emerge historically: Negative Concord (NC) and what I call NPI Dualization. Both patterns, I argue, involve a pairing between an NPI that has an existential-like or low scalar semantics with a homophonous but semantically different expression with a freer distribution; the homophone is semantically negative in Negative Concord but semantically universal in NPI Dualization. The article argues that pragmatic strength plays an important role in the history of NPIs, both in their origin and in NPI Dualization, but is not directly relevant for their licensing synchronically. Instead, it argues for a return to the view that NPIs are lexically marked by a semantically meaningless distributional feature that needs to be valued syntactically. On a conceptual level, the article argues that historical shifts may be matters of likelihood.
Résumé
Cet article vise à mieux comprendre comment les items de polarité négative (IPN) voient le jour et comment ils évoluent dans le temps. Il soutient qu'une expression peut devenir un IPN si sa sémantique la rend pragmatiquement utile dans des contextes négatifs ou d'implication vers le bas, souvent parce que le sens conduit à une force pragmatique, mais parfois parce que sa sémantique conduit à une atténuation pragmatique. Une attention particulière est accordée à deux structures impliquant une force pragmatique pouvant émerger historiquement : la Concordance négative et ce que j'appelle la Dualisation des IPN. Je soutiens que ces deux modèles impliquent un jumelage entre un IPN ayant un sémantisme existentiel ou scalaire faible et une expression homophone mais sémantiquement différente avec une distribution plus libre ; l'homophone est sémantiquement négatif dans la Concordance négative mais sémantiquement universel dans la Dualisation des IPN. L'article propose que la force pragmatique joue un rôle important dans l'histoire des IPN, à la fois dans leur origine et dans la Dualisation des IPN, mais qu'elle n'est pas directement pertinente pour leur légitimation en synchronie. En revanche, il plaide pour un retour à l'idée que les IPN sont marqués lexicalement par une caractéristique distributionnelle sans contenu sémantique qui doit être évaluée syntaxiquement. D'un point de vue conceptuel, l'article soutient que les changements historiques peuvent être des questions de probabilité.
Keywords
- Type
- Thematic Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 68 , Issue 4 , December 2023 , pp. 555 - 589
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2024
Footnotes
Editors’ note: The current article is part of a special-issue collection "Formal Diachronic Semantics", guest-edited by Regine Eckardt, Dag Haug and Igor Yanovich. The first part of the collection appeared as the issue 65:3 in September 2020, and included the general Introduction (doi:10.1017/cnj.2020.13) and articles by Trusswell & Gisborne (doi:10.1017/cnj.2020.11), Onea & Mardale (doi:10.1017/cnj.2020.12), Simonenko & Carlier (doi:10.1017/cnj.2020.14) and Schaden (doi: 10.1017/cnj.2020.15).
Author's note: I wish to thank Igor Yanovich for his thoughtful and incisive comments, his thoroughness and patience. I am also grateful to the reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms. Parts of this article were presented at the Nay Fest (U. of Maryland, May 2018), at a talk at the Linguistics department at Georgetown U. (Feb. 2020), at the (virtual) Sensus Conference (U.of Mass., Sept. 2020) and at the (virtual) Construction of Meaning Workshop (Stanford, April 2022). I benefited greatly from audience comments, as well as those of Héctor Campos, Cleo Condoravdi, Valentine Hacquard, Paul Portner, and Hedde Zeijlstra. Bertille Baron, Valentine Hacquard and Víctor Fernández-Mallat helped me with French, and Aurelia Roman with Romanian. All errors are my own.
References
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