ZAMFIRESCU MIHAELA
The Interpretation of Positive Polarity Items in English and Romanian
Coordinator: Prof. ALEXANDRA CORNILESCU
The PhD thesis ‘The Interpretation of Positive Polarity Items in English and Romanian’ has as main concern the interpretation of lexical Positive Polarity Items (PPIs) in English and Romanian. The reason why I chose to investigate the domain of polarity phenomena is because there are fewer studies of polarity phenomena than on negative polarity. Thus, the second reason why I chose to analyze polarity phenomena in Romanian, and especially positive polarity is because, so far, there were no such studies in the domain. Also, I considered interesting to see if Romanian speakers are sensitive to the domain of polarity, to gather up a corpus and then to find a suitable way to describe the phenomena. Although, there are fewer studies on positive polarity than on negative polarity I believe that the analysis of PPIs in English carries over to Romanian because it is a semantic problem. Partially, this thesis offers a pragmatic perspective of the phenomena of positive polarity (PPIs’ discourse properties – their rhetorical effects in assertive contexts), but, nevertheless syntactic aspects of polarity had to be dealt with as well.
In our investigation of lexical positive polarity in English and then in Romanian, we tried to integrate two main directions: the study of the licensing of PPIs and the semantic features (their inherent meaning). With respect to the licensing of PPIs the study investigates the class of triggers and possible configurations of PPIs concluding that PPIs are doubly marked negative polarity items (NPIs). With respect to the semantic features, the study investigates the inherent meaning of PPIs, revealing the minimal or maximal values incorporated in PPIs. This line of analysis led to the conclusion that PPIs must be subsumed to the class of scalar predicates that give rise to inference phenomena.
Since this is the first time that PPIs have been analyzed in the literature of Romanian, we found it necessary to present experimental studies to see whether Romanian speakers are sensitive to polarity phenomena and to see if lexical PPIs in Romanian resemble English PSIs.
Chapter I (p. 7-40), General Remarks on the Syntax of Polarity, provides an overview of the literature on the syntactic licensing of polarity items.Chapter II, Semantic Properties of Polarity Contexts – Towards a Classification of Polarity Items (p. 41- 92) focuses on semantic accounts of PSIs. First we provide a classification of polarity items looking at the class of negative contexts, the broad class of contexts which license polarity items. We build on the logical properties of these ‘negative contexts’, on the compatibility of polarity items with various semantically definable types of negation.Chapter III, What Makes a Good Polarity Item – A Semantic-Pragmatic Perspective (p. 93-139), presents a pragmatic account of PSIs following the lines of research proposed by Israel (1996).The aim of the fourth chapter, An Analysis of Positive Polarity Items in Romanian (p. 140-267), is to present a semantic analysis of PPIs in Romanian, according to the line of research proposed by Israel (1996, 1997) and Szabolcsi (2004) focusing on the scalar properties of lexical PPIs. We therefore focus on two properties of PPIs, licensing and inherent scalar values. We argue that PPIs are double NPIs, where each NPI-feature represents one negation.
The PhD Thesis ‘The Interpretation of Positive Polarity Items in English and Romanian’ contains an introduction, 4 chapters, a section of ‘General Conclusions’ and 9 annexes.