Papers by Mihaela Zamfirescu
The term polarity item has been used to define the linguistic constructions whose acceptability i... more The term polarity item has been used to define the linguistic constructions whose acceptability in a sentence depends on whether that sentence is grammatically negative or affirmative. This paper discusses lexical positive polarity items in Romanian, like olecuta (‘a little’) and ca dracu (‘as hell’), which cannot occur within the scope of clausemate negation, hypothesis confirmed by native speakers of Romanian in one of the two experiments that the paper presents. Following Israel (1996), the focus, in this paper, lies on the meaning of PPIs, analyzing PPIs as scalar operators, that denote large or small quantities, that have an emphatic or attenuating effect, intensifying or attenuating the rhetorical force of an utterance. Following Israel’s (1996) proposal, polarity sensitivity is understood in this paper as sensitivity to scalar reasoning, and the inferences relevant to polarity licensing do not depend on semantic entailment alone, but on a general ability for scalar reasoning.
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Papers by Mihaela Zamfirescu