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Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Negative Inversion
By Daniel Buring
In this paper I set out to explore the conditions under which preposed phrases trigger inversion. Pushing the hypothesis that all and only those phrases that can license NPIs trigger inversion, I was then forced to come up with a story for all those cases in which an otherwise attestedly negative element seemed to fail to trigger inversion. This strategy revealed a number of straightforward ambiguities that distinguished seemingly minimal pairs such as the with no clothes and not even ten years ago cases.
Extending this line of analysis to the case of less than and its kin (at most, not more than. . . ) lead to the discovery of two distinct semantic construals of these quantifiers, modifying and cumulative v. scope taking and distributive. The analysis I provided for these cases maintains the initial hypothesis that all negative phrases obligatorily trigger inversion, and that, conversely, the non-inverted cases are not DE. An account was given for the subtly, yet clear meaning-differences, the lack of DE, and the difference in prosodic patterning. Finally, the impossibility of no-quantifiers in plain topicalization was traced back to a more general restriction on the relative scope of these and the event quantifier.
Source: Semantics Archive
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Posted by Tony Marmo
at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 9 January 2005 12:41 GMT
