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
10 - Visions and revisions
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
And so we return, roughly, to where we started in this work – that is, to a vision of grammar grounded in communicative interaction, and of pragmatics itself as an integral part of grammatical structure. My own view is that the evidence from polarity sensitivity strongly supports this vision, but I hardly expect those who take a different view to quickly change their minds in the face of a few odd facts. I speak here of visions, after all, and how one views the facts of a matter necessarily depends on how one sees the matter in which the facts consist.
Polarity sensitivity is a complex phenomenon, but there is no reason why a theory of polarity sensitivity should not be simple. The theory I have presented here, the Scalar Model of Polarity, is a simple theory of how grammatical sensitivities can be determined by cognitive constructional semantics. The goal has been to explain both what it is that makes something a polarity item and, incidentally, why it is that polarity items should exist in the first place. The Scalar Model holds that polarity items are scalar operators and as such their denotata must be construed with respect to the information structure supplied by a scalar model. A scalar model is itself a structured set of propositions organized in a way that supports scalar inferencing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Grammar of PolarityPragmatics, Sensitivity, and the Logic of Scales, pp. 256 - 257Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011