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Negative Polarity Additive Particles

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Monotonicity in Logic and Language (TLLM 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12564))

Abstract

Many languages have pairs of additive markers that exhibit a common morphological core. This paper focuses on the Romanian pair şi and nici and offers an analysis that derives their distribution and interpretation. The crux of the analysis is the claim that nici spells out the negative marker n and the additive particle add; n is argued to contribute the negative polarity component while add is assumed to make the same contribution as the positive particle, şi.

I am indebted to Gennaro Chierchia, Luka Crnič, Anamaria Fălăuş, Uli Sauerland and Yasu Sudo for their time and knowledge shared while discussing these issues with me, as well as the many anonymous reviewers who have assessed this work in its various previous forms and the editors of TLLM2020. This research was supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) via grant NI 1850/2-1.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All Romanian data reported in this paper are the author’s, a native speaker of Romanian, and have been checked with at least one other person for both grammaticality and acceptability judgements.

  2. 2.

    At the same time, the use of şi seems obligatory, as has been pointed out to be the case with additive particles more generally. This issue has been investigated at length in [6, 31, 41] and we will return to it briefly in the analysis section.

  3. 3.

    The antecedent proposition does not have to include the sentential negation, unlike the host proposition. It is enough if it’s claimed that Paul dislikes wine.

  4. 4.

    There is interesting ongoing work discussing the differences between only and exh, specifically as they relate to these two points [5, among others].

  5. 5.

    This does not go against a structural view of alternative selection based on complexity considerations since we are considering alternatives to add p rather than to plain p [17, 29].

  6. 6.

    There are some caveats to this condition that are tangential to the point at hand.

  7. 7.

    Y. Sudo (pers. comm.) wonders whether this does not lead to overgenerating in the case of embedded implicatures, e.g. Mary didn’t complete some of the assignments. In other words, if vacuous embedded exhaustification can be made available by the mechanism proposed above, what prevents it from applying to this case? I want to argue that these cases are different since in the case of scalar implicatures, the entailed negated component is necessarily about the same event time, so it does not end up being presupposed under Abrusán’s system.

  8. 8.

    Other neg-words in Romanian are created from nici and a wh-phrase (niciunde ‘nowhere’ and nicidecum ‘no way’) or from nici and an indefinite NP (nicio fată ‘no girl’). A detailed discussion of these elements is beyond the scope of this paper.

  9. 9.

    There are also accounts of PPIs that align better with the two analyses presented above: [27, 36, 47].

  10. 10.

    In fact, nothing prevents us from claiming that the alternative derived via deletion of add, namely p, is also an alternative. Given the interpretation of add, however, including this alternative will not add anything.

  11. 11.

    More recent work does away with recursive exhaustification and instead adopts a notion of innocent inclusion of alternatives as a way to derive the conjunctive inference [7]. I believe that this new approach will be equally suitable in the case at hand but I leave it to future work to probe it further.

  12. 12.

    I simplified the presentation by ignoring the conjunctive alternative since its inclusion is orthogonal to the derivation of the free choice implicature.

  13. 13.

    One reviewer has asked why we don’t also consider alternatives without the negation, since we consider alternatives obtained via deletion. Note that if we were to consider such alternatives, then all the alternatives would be symmetric, and thus none would be excludable, resulting in the vacuous application of exh. While this will have to remain a stipulation for now, the same stipulation regarding the non-deletion of negation has to be adopted even in the simpler cases involving indirect implicatures, i.e. cases of strong scalar items giving rise to implicatures when they occur in the scope of negation.

  14. 14.

    One might wonder whether the first instance of \(\textsc {exh}^{\textsc {n}}\) does not count as vacuous. While at the point of insertion it is, its global contribution does lead to strengthening given that its presence alters the alternatives under consideration by the higher instance of exh.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany

    Andreea C. Nicolae

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Dun Deng

  2. Department of Philosophy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Fenrong Liu

  3. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Bejing, China

    Mingming Liu

  4. Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Dag Westerståhl

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Nicolae, A.C. (2020). Negative Polarity Additive Particles. In: Deng, D., Liu, F., Liu, M., Westerståhl, D. (eds) Monotonicity in Logic and Language. TLLM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12564. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-62843-0_9

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