Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

190 Workshops
Polarity and the additive vs. scalar alternance
Tovena, Lucia
Univ. de Paris VII
tovena@inguist.jussieu.fr
Italian,like several other languages(König 1991),is characterised by the clustering of S(calar)additive
and P(ure)-additive readings in single lexical forms. Where in English we find the
dedicated S-additive particle even and P-additive also, in Italian we find forms like neanche
and neppure that have both readings, are specialised for negative contexts and derive from
positive forms, anche and pure respectively. For instance, anche corresponds to also (1a), but
merger with a negative component yields neanche that works as P-additive n/either (1b) as
well asS-additive (1c), in which caseit corresponds to many uses of even in negative clauses.
Uses of even in positive clauses mostly correspond to the dedicated Italian positive S-additive
particle perfino(1d).
The data in(1) prompt the question whether the two readings of neanche are available also for
positive anche. The answer is no, i.e. anche is only P-additive. 1 In this paper we tackle the
issue of this uneven distribution of readings between positive and negative forms. On the
onehand, the observation that theforms differjust in thepresence of a negative component,
whose merger has consolidated no longer than a century ago, suggests that this component
could be held responsible for the availability of the scalar reading. On the other hand,
negation typically expresses a complementation function, thus is not expected to bring in
scalarity. Our analysis takes into consideration the particular nature of the negative
component at hand. It is not just any prefix but the negative conjunction né (nor), from Latin
nec. Merger cancels its syntactic function as conjunction and (1e) would be illformed were e
(and)missing. But it does not affect the fact that its presence is justified by the function of
connecting two entities. Thus, merged né warrants the existence of preceding alternatives but
does not require them to be overt. Hence,it paves the way to satisfaction of the existential
presupposition (Karttunen and Peters 1979)— typical of additive particles in general — via
accommodation, a crucial factorin making available the scalar reading(Tovena2005,2006).
(1) a. Maria a comprato dei cioccolatini e anche deifiori. (Maria bought chocolates
and also some flowers)
b. Maria non a comprato deicioccolatini. E neanche deifiori. (Maria didn’t buy
chocolates and didn’t buyflowers either)
c. Maria non a comprato neanche dei fiori. (Maria didn’t even buyflowers)
d. Maria a comprato persino dei fiori. (Maria even bought some flowers)
e. Maria non ha studiato l’articolo e neanche l’ha letto. (Maria didn’t study the
paper and didn’teven read it)
References
Karttunen L. and S.Peters,1979,Conventional implicature,In Oh and Dinneen(Eds.),
Presupposition,1–56, Academic Press
König E.,1991, The Meaning of Focus Particles, Routledge
Tovena L., 2005, Discourse and addition, In Proceedings of Discourse Domains and
Information Structure ESSLLI’05,47–56