This paper identifies the set of properties that polarity items (PI), negative polarity items (NPI) and negative concord items (NCI) satisfy in Catalan, Aragonese, Benasquese and Occitan. It shows that in Catalan, gaire ‘much, many’ is a PI, pas ‘at all’ is an NPI with enriched meanings and indefinites such as ningú ‘anybody, n-body’ come in two se...
Published in Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie
This paper traces the developments of the noun bocado as it participates in two polarity-sensitive constructions in the history of Portuguese: the minimizer bocado ‘[not even] a bit’, a negative polarity item in Old Portuguese, and the degree adverbial um bocado ‘a bit’, which emerges in the 1700 s and is a positive polarity item. I adopt Israel’s ...
Published in Annual Review of Linguistics
A major goal of modern syntax has been to find principles that rule out sentences that seem ungrammatical. To achieve this goal, it has been proposed that syntactically odd (or ungrammatical) sentences can be distinguished empirically and theoretically from semantically odd (or semantically anomalous) sentences. However, sometimes it is not clear w...
Published in The Linguistic Review
The ellipsis of a VP whose antecedent contains an occurrence of so-called free choice any is highly constrained: it is acceptable only if the elided VP is appropriately embedded. We show that while this is unexpected on the common approaches to free choice and ellipsis, it is predicted on a theory of any that takes its domain to stand in a dependen...
Published in ExELL
This paper aims to explore whether some rhetorical questions contain certain linguistic elements or forms which would differentiate them from answer-eliciting and action-eliciting questions, and thereby hint at their rhetorical nature even outside the context. Namely, despite the fact that the same questions can be rhetorical in one context, and an...
