What is the communicative value of negative polarity? That is, why do so many languages maintain a stock of special indefinites that occur only in a proper subset of the contexts in which ordinary indefinites can appear? Previous answers include: marking the validity of downward inferences; marking the invalidity of veridical inferences; or triggering strengthening implications. My starting point for exploring a new answer is the fact that an NPI must always take narrow scope with respect to its licensing context. (...) In contrast, ordinary indefinites are notorious for taking wide scope. So whatever other functions NPIs may have, they at least serve as an utterly reliable signal that an indefinite is taking narrow scope. As also proposed in recent work of Kusumoto and Tancredi, I will show that NPIs are only licensed in contexts in which the wide scope construal of an indefinite fails to entail the narrow scope. In other words, weak NPIs occur only in contexts in which taking narrow scope matters for interpretation. Thus one part of the explanation for the ubiquity and robust stability of negative polarity is that it signals scope relations. (shrink)

Next SectionLanguages that are classified as non-Sequence-of-Tense come in more than one variety (e.g., Arregui & Kusumoto 1998): some of these languages allow a past tense in before-clauses while others do not. We propose that some languages have quantificational (existential) tenses, while others have pronominal (referential/bound) tenses. The past tense in before-clauses is ill-formed in a language that has quantificational tenses, because the semantics of before is incompatible with existential quantification over times. A language with pronominal tenses does not (...) have this problem. The pronominal/quantificational tense distinction interacts with the Sequence-of-Tense parameter, providing a general theory of possible and impossible languages. (shrink)