POLARITY ITEM

1. (Grammar) A lexical item that can appear only in environments associated with a particular grammatical polarity—affirmative or negative.
   • Positive polarity item (PPI): A polarity item that appears in affirmative (positive) contexts.
   • Negative Polarity Item (NPI): A polarity item that appears in negative contexts.
    The environment in which a polarity item is permitted to appear is called a licensing context. In the simplest case, an affirmative statement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI. However, there are many complications, and not all polarity items of a given type need necessarily have exactly the same set of licensing contexts.
    As examples of polarity items, consider the English lexical items somewhat and at all:
   1. I liked the film somewhat.
      *I didn't like the film somewhat.
   2. I didn't like the film at all.
      *I liked the film at all.
    | Wikipedia, 2021
2. (Syntax) 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 a 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.
   1. The presence of a dependent variable in the polarity item—a property characterizing NPIs and FCIs in many languages, including Greek, Mandarin, and Korean.
   2. The polarity item may be scalar: English any and FCIs can be scalar, but Greek, Korean, and Mandarin NPIs are not.
   3. 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.
    | Anastasia Giannakidou, 2017

POLARITY MISMATCH
(Syntax) There exists an asymmetry that needs to be accounted for regarding mismatch availability in ellipsis. Voice mismatches are ill-formed in sluicing, yet mismatches involving elements like tense and polarity (among others) can be well-formed. Polarity mismatch appears to be possible:

1. Either you turn in your homework by midnight or you explain why <you didn't turn in your homework by midnight>.

2. Polarity mismatches (Stockwell and Wong 2020)
   a. Either he turned in his final paper by midnight or he explained why <he didn't turn it in by midnight>.
    ✓ Ø − Σ⁰_[+NEG]
   b. ?? Either he DID turn in his final paper by midnight or he explained why <he didn't turn it in by midnight>.
    ✗ Σ⁰_[−NEG] − Σ⁰_[+NEG]

Antecedent	Ellipsis Site	Mismatch	Language	Status
Σ0[−NEG]	Σ0[+NEG]	Emph. affirmative – Negative	English	*
Σ0Ø	Σ0[+NEG]	Affirmative – Negative	English	✓

POLARITY PARTICLE
(Syntax) We conceive of polarity particles as lexical items that morphologically realize polarity features, in line with distributed morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993). Thus, we assume that syntax generates a certain combination of polarity features in the head of a Polarity Phrase, and morphological vocabulary insertion rules insert lexical items, namely polarity particles, that realize these features.
 We give two realization rules below, specifying which features can be realized by which particles. Further, we assume that different features and feature combinations need to be overtly realized to various degrees, depending on the nature of the features involved. We refer to the pressure for overt realization of a feature or feature combination as its realization needs.
 The polarity particle inventory is language-specific and so are the rules connecting particular particles to particular features or feature combinations, though we propose general principles that delimit this variation. In English, there are two polarity particles, yes and no. The realization potential of these two particles is as follows.

1. Realization potential of English polarity particles
   a. [AGREE] and [+] can be realized by yes.
   b. [REVERSE] and [−] can be realized by no.

2. Feature combinations and particles in English
   a. [AGREE, +] can only be realized by yes.
   b. [REVERSE, −] can only be realized by no.
   c. [AGREE, −] can be realized by yes or no.
   d. [REVERSE, +] can be realized by yes or no.

PolP

1. (Syntax) Abbreviation for Polarity Phrase. I argue that disjunctive morphemes like Kannada -oo and English or are connectives that are semantically "sensitive" or "deficient" in the sense of Giannakidou (1997); that is, they "cannot be properly interpreted" except in certain environments. The interpretive environment for the disjunctive connective is provided by a "Polarity Phrase", which hosts the licensors for the disjunctive morpheme. These licensors are principally Neg and the Question operator; Neg being an averidicality operator, and Q possibly subsumable under the class of nonveridicality operators that includes modality and genericity. In Kannada, the head -oo itself must be licensed; in English, the element that is licensed is either, which has been variously argued to be the head or the specifier of the Disjunctive Phrase. | R. Amritavalli, 2003
2. (Syntax) We conceive of "polarity particles" as lexical items that morphologically realize polarity features, in line with distributed morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993). Thus, we assume that syntax generates a certain combination of polarity features in the head of a Polarity Phrase, and morphological vocabulary insertion rules insert lexical items, namely polarity particles, that realize these features. | F. Roelofsen and D.F. Farkas, 2015

POLYSEMY
(Semantics) One and the same word acquires different, though obviously related, meanings, often with respect to particular contexts. For example:

1. a. The bank raised its interest rates yesterday.
   b. The store is next to the newly constructed bank.
   c. The bank appeared first in Italy in the Renaissance.
2. a. John crawled through the window.
   b. The window is closed.
   c. The window is made of security glass.
3. a. The farm will fail unless the drought ends soon.
   b. It is difficult to farm this land.
4. a. The store is open.
   b. The thief tried to open the door.

POSITION OF ANTECEDENT HYPOTHESIS

1. (Syntax) Regarding the processing of Italian subject pronouns, both the null and the overt pronoun, in intra-sentential anaphora, a processing hypothesis is proposed, the "Position of Antecedent Hypothesis", based on the assumption that there is a division of labor, with the null pronoun preferring a more prominent antecedent than the overt one (Carminati 2002).
    Null pronouns tend to refer to the antecedent in [Spec, IP], while overt pronouns tend to refer to an antecedent lower in the sentence. | Laia Mayol, 2009
2. (Syntax) The PAH (Carminati 2002, 2005) is one of the main factors accounting for preferences in languages with null / pronominal subject alternation. According to this hypothesis, null subjects favor a subject antecedent and pronominal subjects, a non-subject antecedent. | Fabian Istrate, Anne Abeillé, and Barbara Hemforth, 2022

POSSESSOR RAISING

1. (Syntax) Or, possessor ascension. The term used for sentences such as (1). The intuition behind this term is that the object is "raised" from the possessor position of the body part noun phrase.
   1. She kissed him on the cheek.
    Possessor raising is a traditional topic in syntactic research. It has been claimed to belong to "the core of the grammatical function changing processes that are allowed by universal grammar" (Baker 1988), even if it has never received the same attention as, for example, the passive. However, it was often discussed in the theoretical literature some time ago, both in Relational Grammar (Frantz 1981, Perlmutter and Postal 1983, Blake 1990) and Principles and Parameters Theory (Baker 1988). There are also descriptions of possessor raising in various languages (e.g. Blake 1984, O'Connor 1996). The literature on the grammar of possession also contains some discussion of possessor raising, including criticism of its traditional conception (see e.g. Chappell and McGregor 1996, Heine 1997, Payne and Barshi 1999). | Helge Lødrup, 2009
2. (Syntax) A possessor NP may move out from the Spec position of a containing NP in some Asian languages such as Chinese and Korean, yielding the so-called Possessor Raising Construction.
    It has been demonstrated that the operation of Possessor Raising is well under the constraint of UG principles in interaction with independently explainable language-particular properties. It is mainly determined by three factors:
   1. Whether the raised possessor NP can be properly Case-marked in its new site.
   2. Whether the nominal residue left behind by the NP movement can be Case-marked.
   3. Whether other applicable conditions on movement such as the Subjacency can be satisfied.
    | Jie Xu, 2004
3. (Syntax) Brazilian Portuguese null possessors are instances of possessor raising through theta-positions.
   1. O
      the

      Ronaldinho₁
      Ronaldinho

      cortou
      cut-3SG

      o
      the

      cabelo
      hair

      e₁
      

      'Ronaldinho cut his hair/had his hair cut'
   2. [_TP [o Ronaldinho]₁ [_VP t₁ cortou [_DP o cabelo t₁]
    | Cilene Rodrigues, 2010

POST-AUXILIARY ELLIPSIS
(Syntax) Abbreviated PAE. We concentrate here on what is very often called VP Ellipsis, though that is a very poorly chosen term (as Hankamer 1978 points out), because it is neither necessary or sufficient that it should involve ellipsis of a VP. Here we follow Sag's terminological suggestion (1976) that it should be called "Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis" (PAE). The defining characteristic is not that a VP is omitted but that a constituent or constituent sequence immediately following an auxiliary is missing. Example (1a) is an instance of PAE that does have a missing VP; and (1b) and (1c) are instances that do not (in (1c) the ellipted sequence does not even form a constituent according to classical constituency tests; for example, it cannot be clefted). In (1d), we see an ellipted VP that is not an instance of PAE—it illustrates Null Complement Anaphora (NCA), a construction of the deep-anaphoric or model-interpretive type (Hankamer and Sag 1976 discuss the properties distinguishing NCA and PAE).

1. a. We don't want to cancel the parade, but we could [_VP cancel the parade ]. [PAE]
   b. You think I'm dumb, but I'm not [_AdjP dumb ], you know. [PAE]
   c. He said there would be results quite soon, and indeed there were [_NP results ] [_AdvP quite soon ]. [PAE]
   d. I couldn't reach him, though I tried [_VP to reach him ] several times. [NCA]

2. a. Be back at six if you can ___. [tautosentential anaphoric PAE]
   b. I rebooted the server. I had to ___. [discourse-anaphoric PAE]
   c. If we must ___, we'll break in. [tautosentential cataphoric PAE]
   d. A: Did you remember to get the milk?
    B: Yes I did ___. [discourse-anaphoric PAE]

POSTNASAL DEVOICING

1. (Phonology) Converse, postnasal voicing. Where an underlying voiced nasal-stop sequence is mapped to a voiceless nasal-stop sequence (ND > NT). Postnasal devoicing is uncommon and often claimed to be phonetically unnatural (e.g. Begus 2019). I argue against this characterization by showing that postnasal devoicing (PND) is perceptually advantageous.
    I know of 14 clear cases of PND. These were identified by consulting Hyman (2001), Stanton (2017), and Begus (2018); all discuss PND.
    Many languages with PND (n=9) allow NCs (nasal+consonant) in prevocalic and word-final positions. These can be divided into two classes:
   1. Some languages exhibit PND word-finally and prevocalically.
   2. Other languages exhibit PND word-finally only.
    The rest of the languages (n=5) exhibit PND in prevocalic position, but they do not allow word-final NCs.
    PND enhances contrast distinctiveness. It occurs far less commonly than postnasal voicing. No language has prevocalic PND without having word-final PND. | Juliet Stanton, 2022
2. (Phonology) Typological studies have uncovered several languages that exhibit some form of postnasal devoicing. The majority of these cases involve diachronic changes, but a few appear to be genuine cases of synchronic grammars that exhibit postnasal devoicing.
    Hyman (2001) and Beguš (2016) report several languages that exhibit PND. Many of these are the result of diachronic changes that ultimately convert voiced stops into voiceless stops in postnasal position, but a few cases of synchronic postnasal devoicing have been claimed to exist. For instance, Hyman (2001), Coetzee and Pretorius (2010), and Solé, Hyman, and Monaka (2010) report on a synchronic postnasal devoicing process in some Sotho-Tswana languages. While the empirical facts and generalizations around this particular process in these languages have been contested (cf. Gouskova, Zsiga, and Tlale 2011), phonetic evidence generally supports the claim that there is, at least for some speakers, postnasal devoicing (Coetzee and Pretorius 2010; Solé, Hyman, and Monaka 2010). | Jason Brown, 2017

POSTNASAL VOICING

1. (Phonology) Where an underlying voiceless nasal-stop sequence is mapped to a voiced nasal-stop sequence (NT > ND). A common process that has a well-known phonetic motivation (e.g. Pater 1999, Hayes and Stivers 2000). PNV enhances articulatory ease. It occurs far more commonly than postnasal devoicing. | Juliet Stanton, 2022
2. (Phonology) Many of the world's languages display a phonetic pattern whereby obstruents appear as voiced when following a nasal consonant (Ferguson 1975). For example, in Wembawemba (Hercus 1986), a single phonemic series of stops normally appears as voiceless (1) but is voiced postnasally (2):
   1. /taka/ ['takʌ] 'to hit'
      /milpa/ ['mɪlpʌ] 'to twist'
   2. /yantin/ ['yandɪn] 'me'
      /panpar/ ['panbʌr] 'shovel'
    The pattern is widespread. Here are some languages that show postnasal voicing:
   3. Arusa (Levergood 1987)
      Eastern Armenian (Allen 1951)
      Japanese (Ito and Mester 1986)
      Modern Greek dialects (Newton 1972)
      Waorani (Saint and Pike 1962)
      Western Desert Language (Douglas 1958)
      Zoque (Wonderly 1951)
    | Bruce Hayes and Tanya Stivers, 2000

POSTSCRIPTS, FUNCTIONS OF
(Epistolography) | One finds hundreds of postscripts in Roman letters. Suggestions were made by Jeffrey Weima (1994) in his discussion of the closing conventions in ancient Hellenistic letters. Weima outlines several functions for postscripts, including:

• Giving information that has come to light following the writing of the letter.
• Giving a final comment or command that has come to the mind of the writer after the letter was finished.
• Reinforcing a previously given command.
• Giving a summary of the main details contained in the body of the letter—various of which relate to the initiator taking control of how the message is received.

PRAGMATIC ENRICHMENT

1. (Pragmatics) Sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to the process in virtue of which the content conveyed by an utterance comes to include all sorts of elements which are contextually implied without being part of what the utterance literally means. In his class notes "Pragmatic Enrichment: Introduction by Examples," Chris Potts gives examples like the following:

    John and Mary have recently started going together. Valentino is Mary's ex-boyfriend.
    One evening, John asks Mary, Have you seen Valentino this week?
    Mary answers, Valentino's been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks.
    Valentino has in fact been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, but it is also the case that Mary had a date with Valentino the night before.

    Mary's utterance clearly suggests a negative (and false) answer to the question: Have you seen Valentino this week? Literally, however, she only says that Valentino has been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, and that is true.
    Now, pace Potts, the phrase "pragmatic enrichment" on its standard use is meant to contrast with "conversational implicature," instead of being a non-technical synonym for it (as it is for Potts). On the standard use, while conversational implicatures belong to the post-semantic layer of interpretation, pragmatic enrichment belongs to the semantic layer: it affects the proposition expressed by an utterance. This puts pragmatic enrichment in the same ballpark as the assignment of contextual values to indexicals and free pronouns. | François Recanati, 2010
2. (Pragmatics) The term "enrichment" has come to be well established in the pragmatics literature and largely accepted across different theoretical standpoints, even though it is often employed as an alternative to more technical vocabulary that does differ between the positions. The phenomenon the term is used for describing is pretty much the same. A typical example is the following (Carston 2002):
   1. He handed her the key and she opened the door
   2. He handed her the key and she opened the door [with the key that he had handed her].
    A normal and typical interpretation of (1) associates with it a content that is more completely articulated in (2), which includes additional linguistic material in brackets. The semantic contribution of this material to (2) is the pragmatic enrichment of (1). That is, when processing (1) the hearer/reader tends to interpret it as representing a type of situation which is more completely represented by (2). That the referent of she used the key handed to her by the referent of he is not semantically represented in (1), but is "read into" it, i.e. pragmatically added during interpretation. It is semantically represented in (2).
    The idea is not that the hearer tacitly adds the bracketed expression during interpretation. It is also not the case, as in normal examples of ellipsis recovery, that there is a particular expression that would be recovered in any effort of making the enrichment explicit. Rather, it is the semantic content (in context) of the added phrase that matters, and often there are alternative possible linguistic additions that are semantically equivalent as far as the linguistic and extra-linguistic context goes. | Peter Pagin, 2014

PRAGMATIC FREE ENRICHMENT
See FREE ENRICHMENT.

PRAGMATIC SKILL
(Pragmatics) Using prosodic cues that can disambiguate broad vs. narrow focus seems to require something special: a high level of "pragmatic skill".
 There's a connection between pragmatic skill and heightened sensitivity to paralinguistic cues of prominence.
 Better pragmatic skill is associated with less overlap between the perceived prominence of prenuclear accented words and nuclear accented words. It's a trend only, but there was marginally significant three-way interaction: accent status × pragmatic skill × listener sex.
 Listeners with worse pragmatic skill are sensitive to one thing: a word's being accented or not accented.
 Results from a Rapid Prosody Transcription task suggest that pragmatic skill is associated with more gradient behavior in judging prominence in connected speech.
 Better pragmatic skill is associated with more reliable perceived differences between discrete contrasts. | Jason Bishop, 2022

PRAGMATICALLY NEUTRAL WORD ORDER
(Grammar) Discussions of word order in languages with flexible word order in which different word orders are grammatical often describe one of the orders as the (pragmatically) unmarked or neutral word order, while other grammatical orders are all described as being marked in some way. In most languages in which one order has been so characterized, the order described as unmarked is also the order which occurs most frequently in spoken or written texts. It is widely assumed, in fact, that this is a necessary characteristic of unmarked word order, that it is part of what it means to be unmarked that the unmarked word order be most frequent. For example, Greenberg (1966) claims explicitly that the unmarked order in a language is "necessarily the most frequent". There are instances, however, in which this assumption has been questioned, in which descriptions of word order in particular languages have claimed that a particular order is unmarked or neutral, even though that order is not significantly more frequent than other orders, and may in fact be less frequent than at least some other orders. | Matthew S. Dryer, 1995

PRE-DP ONLY
(Semantics) Only is traditionally defined as a propositional operator, such as (1). Yet, syntactically, only can occur at various positions, including at a pre-DP position, as in (2).

1. ⟦only⟧^C = λp_<s,t>λw : p(w). ∀p'∈C[p'(w)→p⊆p']
2. Jill brought only wine.

3. Jill may bring only wine. (may > only, only > may)
   1. may > only: Jill is allowed to not bring anything other than wine
   2. only > may: Jill is not allowed to bring anything other than wine

PRE-FORTIS CLIPPING

1. (Phonology) A process whereby vowels are pronounced with shorter durations before voiceless segments. | John McGahay, 2019
2. (Phonology) Refers to the phenomenon in English of vowels being shorter before voiceless obstruents than before voiced ones. | Hyesun Cho, 2015

PRE-VERBAL SLOTS
(Pragmatics) VO languages have two pre-verbal slots:

• Position 1: Established or accessible information.
  • Traditionally distinguished as contrastive topic.
  • Establishes an explicit frame of reference.
  • Represents choice to place info in marked position
  • —a.k.a. point of departure.
• Position 2: Newly asserted information (focal).
  • Traditionally referred to as "emphasis".
  • Most salient information made more prominent, emphasized.
  • Represents choice to place most salient info in a marked position
  • —a.k.a. preposed focal constituent.

Page Last Modified December 30, 2023

 

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