Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Trivium pursuits
- 2 Ex nihilo: the grammar of polarity
- 3 Licensing and the logic of scalar models
- 4 Sensitivity as inherent scalar semantics
- 5 The elements of sensitivity
- 6 The scalar lexicon
- 7 The family of English indefinite polarity items
- 8 Polarity and the architecture of grammar
- 9 The pragmatics of polarity licensing
- 10 Visions and revisions
- Appendix: A catalogue of English polarity items
- Notes
- References
- General index
- Person index
8 - Polarity and the architecture of grammar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Trivium pursuits
- 2 Ex nihilo: the grammar of polarity
- 3 Licensing and the logic of scalar models
- 4 Sensitivity as inherent scalar semantics
- 5 The elements of sensitivity
- 6 The scalar lexicon
- 7 The family of English indefinite polarity items
- 8 Polarity and the architecture of grammar
- 9 The pragmatics of polarity licensing
- 10 Visions and revisions
- Appendix: A catalogue of English polarity items
- Notes
- References
- General index
- Person index
Summary
I fear we are not yet rid of God, for we still believe in grammar.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the IdolsHigh stakes Grammar
Polarity items and polarity sensitivity have been a flashpoint in debates about language and the structure of grammar since the earliest days of generative linguistics. While theories have proliferated and the data have mushroomed in complexity, the terms of the debate have remained fairly constant. The goal is to explain why polarity items should pattern the way they do and, more particularly, to discover what it is in a speaker's mental grammar that conditions these peculiar patterns. For the most part, the debate has centered on the nature of grammatical representation itself, and on the sorts of constructs which must be available within a theory of grammar in order to explain the complex constraints on polarity items. The significance of this debate is not difficult to see: whatever constructs are needed to explain polarity sensitivity in particular should also, and indeed must, be part of the theory of grammar in general. Polarity sensitivity thus becomes a diagnostic for the structure of language itself, and the debate about polarity items ends up being a debate about the architecture of grammar.
The very existence of polarity items raises questions about the nature of human language and its relation to cognition generally.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Grammar of PolarityPragmatics, Sensitivity, and the Logic of Scales, pp. 202 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011