"The polarity of a sentence is crucial for its meaning. It is thus hardly surprising that languages have developed devices to highlight this meaning component and to contrast statements with negative and positive polarity in discourse. Research on this issue has started from languages like German and Dutch, where prosody and assertive particles are systematically associated with polarity contrast. Recently, the grammatical realization of polarity contrast has been at the center of investigations in a range of other languages as well. Core questions concern the formal repertoire and the exact meaning contribution of the relevant devices, the kind of contrast they evoke, and their relation to information structure and sentence mood. This volume brings together researchers from a theoretical, an empirical, and a typological orientation and enhances our understanding of polarity with the help of in-depth analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons dealing with the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and/or prosodic aspects of the phenomenon"--.

• The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• The grammatical realization of polarity contrast: Introductory remarks
  • Do polarity contrast markers interact with layers of meaning beyond negation/affirmation?
  • What is the relation between polarity contrast and focus?
  • Are affirmative particles and prosodic markings equivalent expressions of polarity contrast?
  • How is affirmative and negative polarity represented in syntax and semantics and what impact does polarity have on other elements of grammatical structure?
  • How does polarity contrast relate to discourse structure?
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• From polarity focus to salient polarity: From things to processes
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Salient polarity and accented verbs
    • 2.1 Identifying salient polarity
    • 2.2 Against form-meaning correspondence
    • 2.3 Conclusion
  • 3. Salient polarity and interpretive effects
    • 3.1 Accented verbs and all-given propositions
    • 3.2 Conventionalized interpretations
    • 3.3 Other salient polarity structures
    • 3.4 Source denotations
  • 4. Final remarks
  • Abbreviations
  • References
• Verum focus, sentence mood, and contrast
  • 1. The phenomenon
  • 2. Höhle’s theoretical reconstructions
    • 2.1 Illocution type operator analysis
    • 2.2 VERUM as a truth predicate
  • 3. Sentential force and sentence mood
  • 4. Verum focus in discourse situations
  • 5. Verum focus in embedded clauses
    • 5.1 Verum focus in the left periphery
    • 5.2 Verum effects at the right periphery
  • 6. Deriving the intuition about ‘truth’
  • 7. The sentence mood theory of verum focus
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Complementizers and negative polarity in German hypothetical comparatives
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The typology of hypothetical comparatives
  • 3. Operators and polarity
  • 4. Syntax and grammaticalization
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Veridicality and sets of alternative worlds: On embedded interrogatives and the complementizers that and if
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Embedding clause types
    • 2.1 The use of that and if
    • 2.2 Interrogative clauses as syntactic objects
    • 2.3 Polarity and relativized veridicality
    • 2.4 Scope of the nonveridical operation
  • 3. That vs. if: What do the complementizers denote?
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Biased declarative questions in Swedish and German: Negation meets modal particles (νäl and doch wohl)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Question bias
  • 3. Bias in rejecting questions
  • 4. Rejecting questions in German
    • 4.1 The meaning of the modal particles doch and wohl in isolation
    • 4.2 Combining doch and wohl
    • 4.3 Proposal for German rejecting questions
  • 5. Rejecting questions in Swedish
    • 5.1 Fronted negation
    • 5.2 The modal particle νäl
    • 5.3 Combining fronted negation and modal particles
    • 5.4 Experiment on the interaction of negation and the modal particle väl in Swedish negative rejecting questions
  • 6. Proposal
    • 6.1 Polarity-sensitive items in rejecting questions: Evidence for non-propositional negation
    • 6.2 rejectq and falsum: Illocutionary operators in rejection questions
  • 7. Conclusion
  • References
• On two types of polar interrogatives in Hungarian and their interaction with inside and outside negation
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The structure of canonical polar interrogatives in Hungarian
  • 3. Interpretational contrasts in positive and negative interrogatives
    • 3.1 Inside and outside negation readings of negative polar interrogatives
    • 3.2 Bias properties of polar interrogatives
    • 3.3 Theoretical accounts of bias in negative polar interrogatives
  • 4. Inside and outside negation readings of negative polar interrogatives in Hungarian
    • 4.1 The two form types and their compatibility with is ‘too’ and sem ‘neither’
    • 4.2 Negative polar interrogatives containing vala-indefinites
    • 4.3 Compatibility with positional variants of the adverbs még ‘still’ and már ‘already’
    • 4.4 Inversion and lack of inversion between verbal prefix and verb
  • 5. Conclusion
  • References
• Two kinds of VERUM distinguished by aspect choice in Russian
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. On aspect choice in Russian
  • 3. Varieties of “completed imperfectives”
  • 4. The semantics and pragmatics of perfective and imperfective aspect
  • 5. What is relevant instead of the target state?
  • 6. What is relevant instead of the target state?
  • 7. Existential imperfectives express VERUM
  • 8. (More or less) open issues
  • 9. Conclusions
  • References
• Polarity focus and non-canonical syntax in Italian, French and Spanish: Clitic left dislocation and sì che / sí que-constructions
  • 0. Introduction
  • 1. A definition of polarity focus
  • 2. Strategies for realizing polarity focus in Italian, French and Spanish
    • 2.1 Lexical means for marking polarity focus in Italian, French and Spanish
    • 2.2 Syntactic strategies for marking polarity focus in Italian, French and Spanish
    • 2.3 Sì che / sí que in Italian and Spanish
    • 2.4 Clitic dislocation and polarity focus
  • 3. Polar Left dislocation and sì che / sí que-clefts in the corpus
    • 3.1 Left dislocation and polarity focus in French and Italian
    • 3.2 Polarity focus and the sí que-construction in Spanish
  • 4. Conclusions and further remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• In search for polarity contrast marking in Italian: A contribution from echo replies
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background
    • 2.1 Polarity, focus, and contrast: Terminological distinctions
    • 2.2 Polarity contrast marking from a comparative perspective
    • 2.3 Polarity contrast markers in Italian
  • 3. The study
    • 3.1 Corpora, methods and research questions
    • 3.2 Results
  • 4. Discussion and final remarks
  • Appendix
  • References
• Index