Abstract

This article offers a unified theory of the licensing of Negative and Positive Polarity Items (PIs), focusing on the acceptability conditions of PPIs of the some-type, and NPIs of the any-type. It argues that licensing has both a syntactic and a semantic component. On the syntactic side, the acceptability of PIs is checked in constituents; in fact, for any given PI, only some constituents, referred to as `domains', are eligible for the evaluation of that PI. The semantic dimension of licensing consists in the sensitivity of PIs to the monotonicity properties of the syntactic environments they find themselves in. Two pieces of evidence support the semantic dimension of what I call the ‘environment-based’ approach defended here: (i.) PIs are subject to flip-flop and (ii.) certain inferences affect their acceptability by modifying the monotonicity of their environment. A third property, called ‘entanglement’ and so far unnoticed, is described: the acceptability of PIs depends on the acceptability of other PIs in the same syntactic environment. The latter property is exploited to determine what semantic property some is sensitive to: it turns out that, contrary to the consensus among researchers, some is acceptable in the complement of the set of environments in which any is acceptable, and vice versa.

中文翻译：

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极性项目的域

摘要

本文提供了关于负极性和正极性项目（PI）许可的统一理论，重点是某种类型的PPI和任何一种类型的NPI的可接受条件类型。它认为许可既具有句法成分又具有语义成分。在句法方面，对PI的可接受性进行了检查。实际上，对于任何给定的PI，只有某些成分（称为“域”）才有资格对该PI进行评估。许可的语义方面在于PI对它们所处的语法环境的单调性的敏感性。有两点证据支持本文所捍卫的所谓“基于环境”方法的语义方面： PI受制于触发器，并且（ii。）某些推断会通过修改其环境的单调性来影响其可接受性。描述了第三个属性，称为“纠缠”，迄今为止尚未引起注意：PI的可接受性取决于相同语法环境中其他PI的可接受性。利用后一个属性来确定什么语义属性有些是敏感：事实证明，相反，研究人员的共识，有些是集合环境中的补接受任何是可以接受的，反之亦然。