THE INTERPRETATION OF POSITIVE POLARITY ITEMS IN ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN

“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.” (Mihaela Zamfirescu)