Factivity meets polarity: On two differences between Italian vs. English factives

Citation:

Chierchia. Factivity meets polarity: On two differences between Italian vs. English factives. In: The Semantics of Focus, Degrees and Times. Essays in honor of Roger Schwarzschild. Edited by Altshuler and Rett. New York: Springer ; 2019. pp. 111-134.
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Factivity meets polarity: On two differences between Italian vs. English factives

Abstract:

Italian and English factives differ from each other in interesting and puzzling ways.  English emotive factives (regret, sorry) license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), while their Italian counterparts don’t. Moreover, when factives of all kinds (emotive or cognitive) occur in the scope of negation in Italian an intervention effect emerges that interferes with NPI licensing way more robustly than in English. In this paper, I explore the idea that this contrast between Italian and English may be due to a difference in the Complementizer (C) -system of the two languages that parallels a difference that has been noted in the literature between the singular and the plural definite determiner the with respect to NPI licensing. Understanding how factives differ across language with respect to polarity phenomena is not only interesting in its own right, but also because it sheds further light on how logical contradictions may affect grammaticality judgments.

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Last updated on 03/05/2023