Topics in Semantics: Negative Polarity Items
Course facts
- Payment: Free, no certificate
- Credits: Non Credit
- Learning style: Self-paced, start anytime
- Resources: Lecture Notes; Written Assignments
- Before you start: There are no prerequisites for this course, but permission of the instructor is required for enrollment.
MIT OpenCourseWare details
- As taught in: Fall 2018
- Department: Linguistics and Philosophy
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A research seminar in formal semantics on negative polarity items, examining entailment, definite descriptions, modality and exhaustification.
Words such as “any” sound fine in some sentences and wrong in others, and explaining the pattern turns out to touch much of formal semantics. This research class studies these negative polarity items. Its overarching question is whether the classic insight that their distribution depends on entailment can hold up, and if so, how to state it precisely.
What You Will Achieve
- Compute truth conditions for sentences containing NPIs
- Evaluate entailment-based conditions on NPI distribution
- Analyze exhaustification and free choice in modal contexts
- Argue for or against a formal analysis in a final paper
Program Overview
Environments and the Condition
The first lectures set up the classic generalization and test it on quantifiers.
- Entailment-reversal and non-monotonicity
- Environments, operators, and the Condition
- Modified numeral quantifiers
Strawson Entailment and Definite Descriptions
The next lectures extend the notion of entailment to cases it first seems to miss.
- Strawson entailment
- Singular definite descriptions
- Partitives and distributivity
Modality, Free Choice and Exhaustification
The final lectures take up modal environments, explanations and the remaining problems.
- Existential and universal modals
- Revision of the Condition
- Hindi NPIs and explanation
- Intervention, minimizers, and variation
Course Completion
Job Outlook
This training supports graduate research in formal semantics and linguistics, including academic teaching and research on language.
Good for: Linguistics graduate students working in semantics who want a research-level treatment of polarity and its links to focus, modality and presupposition.
Keep in mind: It is very technical and written for a seminar: the homework is optional, relies on formal notation, and refers to in-class slides. No solutions are listed, and participation and presentation were part of the class.
Bottom line: A specialist seminar on one tightly focused problem, with useful notes for those already in the field.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the homework required?
All homework in this class was optional. The published assignments ask you to provide logical forms, compute meanings and test what a stated condition predicts about the acceptability of 'any'.
What did the class require of students?
The requirements were participation in classroom discussion, a classroom presentation, a final paper and optional homework assignments. None of these has a published sample in the listed materials.
Does it go beyond English?
One lecture mentions Hindi NPIs among other modal environments, probability and explanation, and a later lecture addresses variation. Most of the published homework examples are English sentences.
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