For next Tuesday, please read the following papers, which can be downloaded from the “Readings” sections of this website:
1. Ladusaw, W. (1980) “On the notion ‘affective’ in the analysis of negative-polarity items” (pages 1-7)
2. Fauconnier, G. (1978) “Implication reversal in a natural language” (pages 289-295; those of you who have taken Semantics 1 should read all the way to the end)
Both of these papers are concerned with describing the linguistic contexts in which negative polarity items may grammatically occur. Â As I mentioned in class, the Fauconnier paper draws from the language of First-Order Predicate Logic, which is a quasi-mathematical language used by linguists, philosophers, and mathematicians to concisely represent the meanings of natural language sentences, as well as to investigate meaning relationships between sentences. Â I’ve posted a “crash course” primer along with the Fauconnier paper for those of you who are unfamiliar with First-Order Predicate Logic. Â (The important thing to grasp in both papers is the systematic meaning relationships amongst certain kinds of sentences that the authors uncover, so try not to get too bogged down with the technical details.)