Form and Meaning of (Indefinite) Pronouns

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaf Koeneman ◽  
Hedde Zeijlstra
Keyword(s):  
Free Choice ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Morphological Form ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Semantic Function ◽  
Morphological Differences ◽  
Negative Indefinites ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Indefinite Pronouns

The relation between the morphological form of a pronoun and its semantic function is not always transparent, and syncretism abounds in natural languages. In a language like English, for instance, three types of indefinite pronouns can be identified, often grouped in series: the some-series, the any-series, and the no-series. However, this does not mean that there are also three semantic functions for indefinite pronouns. Haspelmath (1997), in fact distinguishes nine functions. Closer inspection shows that these nine functions must be reduced to four main functions of indefinites, each with a number of subfunctions: (i) Negative Polarity Items; (ii) Free-Choice Items; (iii) negative indefinites; and (iv) positive or existential indefinites. These functions and subfunctions can be morphologically realized differently across languages, but don’t have to. In English, functions (i) and (ii), unlike (iii) and (iv), may morphologically group together, both expressed by the any-series. Where morphological correspondences between the kinds of functions that indefinites may express call for a classification, such classifications turn out to be semantically well motivated too. Similar observations can be made for definite pronouns, where it turns out that various functions, such as the first person inclusive/exclusive distinction or dual number, are sometimes, but not always morphologically distinguished, showing that these may be subfunctions of higher, more general functions. The question as to how to demarcate the landscape of indefinite and definite pronouns thus does not depend on semantic differences alone: Morphological differences are at least as much telling. The interplay between morphological and semantic properties can provide serious answers to how to define indefinites and the various forms and functions that these may take on.

scholarly journals The Interpretation of Disjunction in the Scope of Dou in Child Mandarin

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shasha An ◽  
Peng Zhou ◽  
Stephen Crain
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Downward Entailing ◽  
The Right

A recent theory provides a unified cross-linguistic analysis of the interpretations that are assigned to expressions for disjunction, Negative Polarity Items, Free Choice Items, and the non-interrogative uses of wh-phrases in languages such as Mandarin Chinese. If this approach is on the right track, children should be expected to demonstrate similar patterns in the acquisition of these linguistic expressions. Previous research has found that, by age four, children have acquired the knowledge that both the existential indefinite renhe “any” and wh-words in Mandarin Chinese are interpreted as Negative Polarity Items when they are bound by downward entailing operators, but the same expressions are interpreted as Free Choice Items (with a conjunctive interpretation) when they are bound by deontic modals (Mandarin keyi) or by the Mandarin adverbial quantifier dou “all”. The present study extends this line of research to the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe. A Truth Value Judgment Task was used to investigate the possibility that disjunction phrases that are bound by the adverbial quantifier dou generate a conjunctive interpretation in the grammars of Mandarin-speaking 4-year-old children. The findings confirmed this prediction. We discuss the implications of the findings for linguistic theory and for language learnability.

Indefinites and negation in the history of Latin

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-201
Author(s):  
Chiara Gianollo
Keyword(s):  
Major Change ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Double Negation ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Extreme Dependence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Indefinites

This chapter is a study of Latin indefinites in direct-negation contexts. These indefinites are interesting from a theoretical point of view because of their extreme dependence on the surrounding structural conditions, and because of the variety of their instantiations in different linguistic systems. Two phenomena of Latin grammar with wide-ranging implications for the development of Romance indefinites are discussed: the syntax of negation and the diachronic pathways followed by indefinites interacting with it. Latin is a Double Negation language, whereas Early Romance exhibits Negative Concord. The study proposes that this typological shift is linked to another major change from Latin to Romance, namely the change from OV to VO. Late Latin is analyzed as a ‘concealed’ nonstrict Negative Concord language, in which restrictions in the use of the ‘old’ negative indefinites emerge, as well as new patterns with (new) negative-polarity items.

scholarly journals A typology of negation in a constraint-based framework of syntax and semantics

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henriette De Swart
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Double Negation ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Storage Mechanism ◽  
Scope Ambiguities ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Negative Indefinites ◽  
Polyadic Quantifier

Negation and negative indefinites raise problems for the principle of compositionality of meaning, because we find both double and single negation readings in natural languages. De Swart and Sag (2002) solve the compositionality problem in a polyadic quantifier framework. The syntax-semantics interface exploits an extension of the Cooper storage mechanism that HPSG uses to account for scope ambiguities. In de Swart and Sag (2002), all negative quantifiers are collected into an N-store, and are interpreted by means of iteration (double negation) or resumption (negative concord) upon retrieval. This puts the ambiguity between single and double negation readings in the grammar, rather than in the lexical items. This paper extends the earlier analysis with a typology of negation and negative indefinites using bi-directional optimality theory (OT). The constraints defined are universal, but their ranking varies from one language to the next. In negative concord languages, the functional motivation for the marking of 'negative variables' wins out, so we use n-words. Double negation languages value first-order iteration, so we use plain indefinites or negative polarity items within the scope of negation. The bi-directional set-up is essential, for syntactic and semantic variation go hand in hand.

scholarly journals Cumbersome paths to indefiniteness. Evidence from an Old Occitan customary

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 245-275
Author(s):  
Mikolaj Nkollo
Keyword(s):  
Free Choice ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Old Occitan ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Clausal Negation ◽  
Syntactic Properties

The central problem of this paper is the evolution of common nouns assumed to have turned into indefinite pronouns. The linguistic data have been retrieved from the Costuma d’Agen, a 13th-century Occitan Customary. The choice of this text is warranted by multiple relations obtaining between the architecture of legal codices and the presence of indefinite expressions. In this text, the contexts in which re (< Lat. acc. rem), ‘anything’ or ‘nothing’ occurs have been identified. This word is shown to be pervasive in Negative Concord (NC; under the scope of no(n), the expression of clausal negation), thereby meeting the requirements imposed upon negative polarity items (NPIs). Outside NC, re appears in conditional protases and temporal clauses introduced by ‘before’. Irrespective of the context in which it appears, Old Occitan re turns out to be fairly advanced on the grammaticalization scale: unlike its etymon, it no longer inflects for number, it does not take determiners and fails to function as a subject in the Costuma d’Agen. Comparative evidence from Gascon 13th century texts proves that, although the descendants of rem of that period occur in the same structural environments (all of them are, by then, free-choice items, FCIs), they do not evolve at the same pace as their Occitan cognate. In other words, even in neighboring linguistic zones, these expressions differ with respect to the degree of persistence of syntactic properties inherent to Latin common nouns. Finally, re is matched against other FCIs, such as hom or home ‘anybody’ or ‘nobody’ and autrui ‘someone else’ or ‘someone else’s’. Compared to re, the medieval developments of these items are far more diversified and retain more original features of their etymons. The difference is traced back to the greater conceptual salience of the animate domain.

scholarly journals Focus particles, secondary meanings, and Lexical Resource Semantics: The case of Japanese shika

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akio Hasegawa ◽  
Jean-Pierre Koenig
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Recent Proposal ◽  
Focus Particles ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Lexical Resource ◽  
Logical Negation ◽  
Secondary Meaning ◽  
Downward Entailing ◽  
Resource Semantics ◽  
Semantic Properties

Japanese has two exclusive particles ˋshika' and ˋdake'. Although traditionally, both particles were considered to be exclusive particles like ˋonly', a recent proposal claims that ˋshika' is an exceptive particle like ˋeveryone except' to account for the necessary co-occurrence of the negative suffix ˋna' and ˋshika'. We show that this negative suffix lacks two critical semantic properties of ordinary logical negation: It is not downward entailing, nor does it license negative polarity items. We show that both ˋshika' and ˋdake' are exclusive particles, but that ˋshika' encodes an additional secondary meaning. The negative suffix only contributes to the sentence's secondary meaning when it co-occurs with ˋshika'. We present an HPSG and LRS analysis that models the co-occurrence of ˋshika' and the negative suffix ˋna', and their contribution to the sentence's secondary meaning.

Polarity in the Semantics of Natural Language

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Giannakidou
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Polarity Item ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Syntactic Dependency ◽  
Habitual Sentences

This paper provides an overview of polarity phenomena in human languages. There are three prominent paradigms of polarity items: negative polarity items (NPIs), positive polarity items (PPIs), and free choice items (FCIs). What they all have in common is that they have limited distribution: they cannot occur just anywhere, but only inside the scope of licenser, which is negation and more broadly a nonveridical licenser, PPIs, conversely, must appear outside the scope of negation. The need to be in the scope of a licenser creates a semantic and syntactic dependency, as the polarity item must be c-commanded by the licenser at some syntactic level. Polarity, therefore, is a true interface phenomenon and raises the question of well-formedness that depends on both semantics and syntax. Nonveridical polarity contexts can be negative, but also non-monotonic such as modal contexts, questions, other non-assertive contexts (imperatives, subjunctives), generic and habitual sentences, and disjunction. Some NPIs and FCIs appear freely in these contexts in many languages, and some NPIs prefer negative contexts. Within negative licensers, we make a distinction between classically and minimally negative contexts. There are no NPIs that appear only in minimally negative contexts. The distributions of NPIs and FCIs crosslinguistically can be understood in terms of general patterns, and there are individual differences due largely to the lexical semantic content of the polarity item paradigms. Three general patterns can be identified as possible lexical sources of polarity. The first is the presence of a dependent variable in the polarity item—a property characterizing NPIs and FCIs in many languages, including Greek, Mandarin, and Korean. Secondly, the polarity item may be scalar: English any and FCIs can be scalar, but Greek, Korean, and Mandarin NPIs are not. Finally, it has been proposed that NPIs can be exhaustive, but exhaustivity is hard to precisely identify in a non-stipulative way, and does not characterize all NPIs. NPIs that are not exhaustive tend to be referentially vague, which means that the speaker uses them only if she is unable to identify a specific referent for them.

Negative polarity items in Ewe

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS COLLINS ◽  
PAUL M. POSTAL ◽  
ELVIS YEVUDEY
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Linguistic Support ◽  
The Common

Collins & Postal (2014) argue that English NPIs have two distinct syntactic structures: a unary NEG structure and a binary NEG structure. They suggest that this distinction is generally valid for natural languages. This formal difference was taken to reconstruct the common distinction in NPI studies between strong and weak NPIs. The present analysis of Ewe NPIs seeks to provide cross-linguistic support for this dual conception of NPIs by showing that the ke-NPIs in this language are all properly analyzed exclusively as unary NEG structures.

scholarly journals SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF ENGLISH ANY- AND SLOVENE RANDOMNESS INDEFINITES

1970 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
Kristina Gregorčič
Keyword(s):  
Free Choice ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Negative Bias ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Reference Corpus ◽  
Downward Entailing ◽  
Pragmatic Aspects

The present paper discusses semantic and pragmatic features of English any-indefinites, and Slovene bare and koli-indefinites. In the Slovene linguistic literature, both bare and koli-indefinites have been known as randomness pronouns. However, examples from the Slovene reference corpus Gigafida 2.0 show that these indefinites are not always interchangeable, as their mutual name might suggest. Koli-indefinites strongly resemble any-indefinites, which are negative polarity items: they seek downward entailing environments in which they can but need not be stressed, depending on whether their inherent even-operator is highlighted or not. What is more, both any- and koli-indefinites necessarily acquire stress and generate free-choice inferences in non-downward entailing modal contexts. Slovene bare indefinites, on the other hand, share only certain features of unstressed any-indefinites: they behave like existential quantifiers and express the speaker’s ignorance or indifference. Unlike the any-series, the bare series can be used in the scope of non-adversative predicates and cannot trigger negative bias in questions. This might suggest that Slovene bare indefinites do not contain an even-operator. What is more, they are unable to generate free-choice readings, which are typical of any- and koli-indefinites.

scholarly journals Braucht niemanden zu scheren: A survey of NPI licensing in German

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Richter ◽  
Jan-Philipp Soehn
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Npi Licensing ◽  
German Data ◽  
Semantic Properties

In this contribution we will argue that negative polarity is a collocational phenomenon that does not follow from other properties of the respective lexical elements. With German data as evidence, we will follow a proposal by van der Wouden and treat Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as collocates which must be licensed by abstract semantic properties of their contexts. Using a collocation module for HPSG, which has been independently motivated for bound words and idioms, we will show how to restrict the occurrence of NPIs to legitimate environments, starting from the negativity hierarchy of licensing environments by Zwarts. Besides a more fine-grained semantic licenser hierarchy, we will establish syntactic licensing domains and general collocational restrictions of NPIs.

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