Abstract
Italian and English factives differ from each other in interesting and puzzling ways. English emotive factives (regret, sorry) license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), while their Italian counterparts don’t. Moreover, when factives of all kinds (emotive or cognitive) occur in the scope of negation in Italian an intervention effect emerges that interferes with NPI licensing way more robustly than in English. In this paper, I explore the idea that this contrast between Italian and English may be due to a difference in the Complementizer (C)-system of the two languages that parallels a difference that has been noted in the literature between the singular and the plural definite determiner the with respect to NPI licensing. Understanding how factives differ across languages with respect to polarity phenomena is not only interesting in its own right, but also because it sheds further light on how logical contradictions may affect grammaticality judgments.
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Notes
- 1.
A function f is Strawson-Downward Entailing iff for any p, any world w and any q such that q ⊆ p, if f(p) is true in w and q is defined in w, then f(p) ⊆ f(q). The definition of Strawson-DE can be readily generalized to all types that end in t.
- 2.
In the examples in (2) I use systematically the subjunctive, which usually facilitates NPI-licensing (cf. the primed counterparts of the sentences in (2), which are given for contrast). Use of the indicative with emotive factives is also possible, and it makes the ungrammaticality of the relevant sentences more severe.
- 3.
Some English speakers find the examples in (3) marginal. However, Klapheke (2017) has a run a Mechanical Turk experiment, comparing English, Italian, and French on data sets corresponding to (3) versus (4), and the ratings do differ systematically and significantly between English versus Italian along the lines indicated in the text.
- 4.
By analogy is with contrasts like
It is fairly easy to see why (i) constitutes a contradiction, while (ii) does not. As is well known in many languages NPIs are literally constructed in this way (even + an expression of minimal quantity). Standard references on this are Lee and Horn (1994) and Lahiri (1998).
- 5.
In fact, also ordinary indefinites activate subdomain alternatives, as this is arguably a necessary step for them to get Free Choice readings (as in (i)) or ‘epistemic ignorance’ readings (as in (ii)).
However, ordinary indefinites do not activate such alternatives obligatorily, the way polarity sensitive indefinites do. See Fox (2007) on free choice uses of disjunctions and indefinites; see also Chierchia (2013) for an extension of Fox’s approaches to polarity sensitive items. For a variety of approaches to epistemic indefinites see Alonso Ovalle and Menendez Benito (2015).
- 6.
Lahiri (1998) observes that the restriction of the theSG is both Strawson-DE and Strawson-UE and argues that for this reason theSG fails to license NPIs in its restriction.
- 7.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pointing out the centrality of these issues for the present proposal.
- 8.
Cases where theSG licenses NPIs are typically generic, cf. the following example from Homer (2011) who credits Jack Hoeksema for it:
(a) The student who has ever tried to grasp this theorem knows how hard it is.
Presumably, the NPI is licensed here by the Generic operator rather than by the definite. See Homer (2011, pp. 188–199) for relevant discussion.
- 9.
See Chierchia (2013, Chapter 7) for further discussion. Ahn (2016) provides an analysis of too as a conjunction with an anaphoric element, that allows to reduce intervention by too to ordinary cases of intervention by strong scalar items like and. Cf., e.g., the contrast between (i) and (ii).
This constitutes a step forward with respect to Chierchia’s original proposal. The logic of Ahn’s approach could be extended to the present case. For example, one might explore the idea that at issue entailments must be considered (on par with) scalar alternatives to the assertion (cf. Romoli 2015). For example, The boy left (=“there is a boy around and he left”, uttered in a situation in which it is known that there is just one boy around) has as alternative ‘there is a boy around’. In the positive case this has no effect, because the alternative is entailed. But in the negative (The boy didn’t leave), exhaustification would yield ‘there is a boy around and he didn’t leave’, which is just the right result, and would immediately account for the intervention effect along fully general lines. However, pursuing this idea in more detail here would take us too far afield.
- 10.
As pointed out by a referee, know does allow for C-deletion. So Ormazabal’s generalization should probably be construed as identifying a tendency rather than in absolute terms.
- 11.
Two technical points are worth commenting on in this connection. First, the DE character of the antecedent of conditionals is subject to contextual restrictions. See on this, e.g., von Fintel (2001), and Chierchia (2013). The approach outlined in the text is very close to von Fintel’s position, modulo the substitution of exhaustification for the licensing condition in terms of Strawson-entailment he proposes.
Second, the formula in (20) only represents the assertive content of John regrets that he ever met Mary. The full-blown representation of the meaning of this sentence, presupposition included, is:
where the first line in (i) is the presupposition encoded in ‘∩w’ in (19c), and in the second line we have the truth-conditions.
- 12.
Using the definition of fact given in (16b), this can be equivalently stated as:
This version may make the parallelism with the singular definite determiner even clearer.
- 13.
According to Homer (2011), French might have an intermediate status between English and Italian: In French, emotive factives license NPIs as in English, but cognitive factives intervene with respect to NPI-licensing as in Italian. On the present approach, this would entail that French emotive factives select thatW as in English, but the rescue strategy for cognitive factives operative in English is not available in French. Obviously, to test whether this hypothesis is on the right track will take further work. The present paper is a first approximation attempt at developing a calculus which is both restrictive enough to rule out unattested patterns and flexible enough to deal with the intricacy of the data.
- 14.
E.g., ordinary indefinites have ‘Free Choice’ construals in context such as:
FC uses of ordinary indefinites have presumably to go through the same semantic mechanism operative in the case of FC readings in general, which is, in fact, the activation of sub-domain alternatives. See Fox (2007), Chierchia (2013).
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Acknowledgements
Versions of this paper were given at Zas in Berlin, at SUNY Stony Brook, at UC Berkeley, and the Research Institute for Linguistics in Budapest. I am very grateful to those audiences for their input. I also wish to thank Anamaria Falauš, Valentine Hacquard, Alex Klapheke, and Florian Schwarz for good discussions of the central questions addressed in this paper. Finally, an anonymous referee provided me with very insightful comments. Some key ideas presented here came about as an unexpected, almost subconscious byproduct of a joint seminar with Roger Schwarzschild on plural and mass nouns in the Fall of 2015; that seminar was in every respect both fun and enlightening, as all my interactions with Roger over the years.
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Chierchia, G. (2019). Factivity Meets Polarity: On Two Differences Between Italian Versus English Factives. In: Altshuler, D., Rett, J. (eds) The Semantics of Plurals, Focus, Degrees, and Times. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04438-1_6
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