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
4 - Sensitivity as inherent scalar semantics
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
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
Oscar Wilde (1894)Scalar operators
Why should polarity items be sensitive to scalar inferencing? In some cases the answer is simple. Just like the quantificational superlatives, many NPIs literally designate a scalar endpoint. Some are themselves superlatives indicating minimal degrees: the foggiest notion, the least bit, in the slightest. Others, like sleep a wink, lift a finger, and a shred of evidence, feature a stereotypical minimal unit on some scale. These minimizer NPIs are like superlatives which only allow a quantificational reading: they have no inherent referential value, and so they cannot refer to a specific minimal unit, but they can be used emphatically, as a way of triggering reference to the ordered set of elements on a conceptual scale. And of course this is only possible in scale-reversing contexts, where pragmatic inferences are licensed from lower to higher scalar values.
So, at least for the minimizer NPIs, the sensitivity to scalar inferencing seems intuitively well motivated. But how should this sensitivity be represented in the lexicon? And more importantly, will this sort of intuitive explanation extend to other polarity items with similar sensitivities but with very different scalar semantic properties? This chapter seeks answers to these questions by exploring the hypothesis that polarity items in general constitute a broad but well-defined class of scalar operators.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Grammar of PolarityPragmatics, Sensitivity, and the Logic of Scales, pp. 79 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011