2nd Semester 2023/24: Negative Polarity Items

Instructors

Giorgio Sbardolini

ECTS

6

Description

This Project is a deep-dive into the (large) literature on Negative Polarity Items: linguistic expressions that display surprising behavior in the presence of negation and other non-assertion operators (such as questions). A classic example is the word "any": it is fine to say "I didn't see any sailor" and "Have you seen any sailor?", but "I saw any sailor" sounds ungrammatical. Traditionally, "any" has been described as requiring downward entailing contexts (such as the argument of negation): this is why it is called an NPI. Yet is has also been long known that "any" is fine once properly restricted ("Any sailor who arrived late was fired") or under a possibility modal ("Any sailor can tell you the truth"). These are known as Universal-any and Free Choice-any. An influential contemporary account of NPIs makes use of exhaustification. We will look at exhaustification-based accounts but also at earlier accounts of NPIs, with the aim of working through the logical properties of NPIs. What kind of quantifier is "any"? What aspects of negation does it interact with? What assumptions about cognition do various theories of NPIs make? This Project is organized as an American-style grad seminar: 4 readings per week, 3 mandatory and 1 optional, and meetings are discussion based with the exception of the 1st and 2nd intro meetings.

Organisation

This Project is organized as an American-style grad seminar: 4 readings per week, 3 mandatory and 1 optional, and meetings are discussion based with the exception of the 1st and 2nd intro meetings.

Prerequisites

None.

Assessment

Each student is required to present 1 reading and write a project proposal motivating something they would like to study more concerning NPIs. This requires learning how to prepare a handout, summarize a paper, and learning how to write a project proposal.