Course Description
This course is concerned with Negative Polarity Items. While raising familiar foundational questions for linguistic theory, Negative Polarity Items enter into complex and often revealing interactions with a host of other phenomena in grammar. Investigating several such interactions, the course touches on topics such as …
This course is concerned with Negative Polarity Items. While raising familiar foundational questions for linguistic theory, Negative Polarity Items enter into complex and often revealing interactions with a host of other phenomena in grammar. Investigating several such interactions, the course touches on topics such as focus, presupposition, exhaustification, quantification, (in)definiteness, modals and attitudes, comparison and superlatives, and questions.
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Lecture Notes
Like the clouds that simultaneously obscure and reveal the sun in Alfred Stieglitz’s 1926 photograph “Equivalent #314,” negative polarity items may appear mysterious but can give us a window on the interaction of logic and grammar. (Public domain image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
