The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs.

The telic-atelic distinction has been argued to hinge on the presence of a (bounded) internal argument measuring out the event, or, alternatively, a resultative small clause providing an end point for the event. Both perspectives are partially correct and partially incorrect. On the one hand, the resultative is more adequately seen as a measure than an end point; on the other, it is the resultative predicate rather than the internal argument that performs this measuring function. Empirical evidence is adduced in support of this point of view: resultative predicates are subject to the requirement that they denote a bounded scale. Only bounded predicates can delimit an event by providing it with minimal parts. As a matter of conceptual necessity, unbounded predicates, though potentially denoting end points, cannot function as event measures.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia have phonological deficits that are claimed to cause their language and literacy impairments and to be responsible for the overlap between the two disorders. Little is known, however, about the phonological grammar of children with SLI and dyslexia, and indeed whether they show differences in phonological development. We designed a nonword repetition task to investigate the impact of word position and stress on the production accuracy of onset clusters. We compared the performance of children with SLI and dyslexia, SLI only, and dyslexia only (mean age eleven), and three groups of typically developing children (aged five, seven, and nine). Analysis of cluster production accuracy revealed that all three clinical groups made significantly more errors on word-medial clusters compared to word-initial clusters. Unstressed clusters were more difficult than stressed clusters for the two dyslexic groups but not the SLI-only group. None of the groups of typically developing children showed an effect of word position or stress on cluster accuracy. All groups, however, created new clusters significantly more frequently in initial than medial positions. These results indicate a difference in phonological grammar in children with SLI and dyslexia that could potentially shed light on the relationship between the two disorders. Furthermore, they indicate that structural position and stress are developmentally independent elements in phonological representations.