Abstract
Guerzoni and Sharvit (Linguistics and Philosophy 30:361–391, 2007) provide an argument that plural, but not singular, wh-phrases may contain a negative polarity item in their restriction, and connect this with the semantic property of exhaustivity. I will show that this claim is factually incorrect, and that the theory of negative polarity licensing does not need to be complicated by taking number distinctions into account. In addition, I will argue that number distinctions do not appear to be relevant for polarity items in the restriction of definite noun phrases either.
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Acknowledgements
For useful comments and feedback on an earlier draft of this paper, I thank Anastasia Giannakidou, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal, as well as the students at my 2006 seminar on polarity items at Swarthmore College where I first started to explore some of the issues in this paper.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Hoeksema, J. There is no number effect in the licensing of negative polarity items: a reply to Guerzoni and Sharvit. Linguist and Philos 31, 397–407 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9041-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9041-2