On the derivation of attenuating polarity sensitivity in the domain of degree modifiers

Abstract

This work investigates three patterns of polarity (in)sensitivity in the domain of adjectival degree modification: modifiers such as fairly are positive polarity items, those such as (all) that are negative polarity items, and those such as very are not polarity sensitive. Modifiers like fairly and (all) that belong to the broad class of attenuating polarity items (Israel 1996), which are widespread crosslinguistically but not well accounted for by leading semantic theories of polarity sensitivity. We demonstrate that their behavior can nonetheless be captured in an alternative-based semantic framework, by supplementing strength-based competition with a second mechanism, namely simplicity-based competition. We demonstrate that this approach can provide a general account of the three classes in question, and discuss potential extensions within the degree domain and beyond, as well as some open questions that remain.