A POLARITY-SENSITIVE DISJUNCTION: SPANISH NI ... NI RAÚL ARANOVICH University of California Davis 1.
Introduction Spanish has a coordinating particle, ni, which is subject to a polarity requirement. As argued in Bosque (1980, 1994) and Herburger (1999a), phrases coordinated with ni (ni-XPs, from now on) must appear in the scope of a negative operator. For instance, ni-XPs must be preceded by negation if they are in postverbal position (1)1. (1)
Las cartas *(no) llegarán ni por avión ni por barco. The letters not will.arrive ni by plane ni by ship. "The letters will neither arrive by plane nor by ship."
In this paper I argue that ni-XPs are subject to a polarity requirement because they are disjunctions, which can only satisfy a requirement of pragmatic strengthening in the scope of negation. My argument assumes the widening/strengthening (W/S) account of polarity sensitivity developed in Heim (1984), Kadmon and Landman (1993), Israel (1996), and Lahiri (1998), among others. The W/S account states that polarity-sensitive items are subject to a couple of seemingly incompatible constraints. From a semantic point of view, NPIs have a wider denotation than a set of alternatives. From a pragmatic point of view, however, NPIs must strengthen the statement they occur in. These two requirements can only be satisfied in contexts like the scope of negation, which reverse the normal direction of entailments. A key hypothesis in my analysis is that ni-XPs are disjunctions, a claim that I defend based on syntactic and semantic properties of ni-XPs. Disjunctive 1
The following abbreviation is used in the glosses: RECP (reciprocal). Since negative expressions like nada, can be translated as either 'nothing' or 'anything', it will be glossed as 'n-thing' (similarly for nadie 'anybody, nobody' or ninguno 'any N, no N'). Occurrences of ni are glossed as ni.
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coordinations, I suggest, are the weakest members of a set of expressions that includes conjunctive coordinations and the independent coordinated phrases (forming an inclusion lattice, in terms of Krifka 1992). Their disjunctive nature makes Ni-XPs semantically wide (being the bottom element of a polarity lattice). In accordance with the W/S account, then, ni-XPs are limited to appearing in the scope of negation because only there can they satisfy a pragmatic strengthening requirement. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 shows that ni-XPs are in fact polarity-sensitive items, and discusses other details of the grammar of niXPs against the background of negative concord. Section 3 gives evidence for the hypothesis that coordinated constructions with the particle ni are disjunctions, and not conjunctions. In section 4 I summarize the widening/strengthening account of polarity sensitivity, and I apply this analysis to explain the distribution of ni-XPs. Conclusions are presented in section 6. 2.
Negative concord and ni-XPs Spanish is a 'negative concord' language. When expressions like nada 'nothing', nadie 'no one', and ninguno N 'no N' (often referred to in the literature as n-words) precede the verb, they count as an expression of negation (2). But when they follow the verb, they must occur with the negative adverb no 'not' or with another n-word in preverbal position. When this occurs, as in (4), the clause is interpreted as having a single instance of sentential negation, and not as a statement with multiple negations. (2)
Nadie ha leído este poema. Nbody has read this poem "Nobody has read this poem."
(3)
López *(no) sabe nada. López (not) knows nthing "López (doesn't) know(s) anything."
(4)
Nadie ha leído ninguno de estos poemas. Nbody has read none of these poems "Nobody has read any of these poems."
Bosque (1980) and Laka (1990) make the influential suggestion that Spanish n-words are 'negative polarity items', i.e. expressions whose
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distribution is conditioned by the polarity of their context of occurrence2. They reach this conclusion on account of the limited distribution of n-words. Across languages, it is not uncommon to find lexical items that must be licensed by negation or other 'affective' expressions (the term that Klima 1964 uses to describe the phenomenon). English NPIs like anything, for example, is excluded from simple statements (5), but it occurs in the scope of negation (6), in the restriction of universal quantifiers (7), and in a variety of other environments. (5)
*Sandy ate anything
(6)
Sandy did not eat anything
(7)
Every student who had ever read anything on phrenology attended the lectures. (Ladusaw 1979:149)
According to Bosque (1980) and Laka (1990), the limited distribution of n-words in Spanish shows that they are NPIs as well. Following the same line of reasoning, ni-XPs are NPIs too. As shown before, in example (1), niXPs must be preceded by a negative expression if they are in postverbal position. This negative expression can be also an n-word. (8)
Ninguna carta llegará ni por avión ni por barco. none letter will.arrive ni by plane ni by ship. "No letters will arrive by plane or by ship."
In preverbal position, ni-XPs count as the sole expression of negation (9). I follow the analysis in Giannakidou (1998, 2000), according to which preverbal n-words are licensed by a negative adverb that deletes when preceded by an n-word in some negative concord languages. Ni-XPs pattern with other n-words in this respect as well.
(9) 2
Ni Fulano ni Mengano (*no) salieron a caminar. Ni Fulano ni Mengano (not) went.out to walk
This is by no means the only position found in the literature about n-words in Spanish, or in the Romance languages in general. Vallduví (1994) and Aranovich (1996) question claims about the parallel distribution of n-words and English NPI's, while Herburger 1999b, following work by Zanuttini (1987, 1991), argues that n-words are ambiguous between a universal and an existential interpretation.
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"Neither Fulano nor Mengano went on a walk." An intriguing fact about ni-XPs, mentioned in Bosque (1994), is that the doubling of the conjunction is mandatory in preverbal position (10), but optional in postverbal position. He argues that the initial ni is necessary to identify a ni-XP as expressing negation. (10) *(Ni) Fulano ni Mengano salieron a caminar. Ni Fulano ni Mengano went.out to walk "Neither Fulano nor Mengano went on a walk." There is another function of ni, not as a coordinating particle but as a focus particle. These phrases with focus ni are minimizers, which can sometimes be translated as 'not even NP'. (11) Ni Gómez asistió a la reunión. Ni Gómez attended to the meeting "Not even Gómez attended the meeting." Like ni-XPs, focus ni is a kind of NPI. In preverbal position a ni-minimizer expresses negation by itself, without any additional negative expressions. In postverbal position it requires a preverbal negative expression, and when the two co-occur they do not give rise to multiple negative readings in the clause. The relationship between the use of ni as a conjunction, and its use as a focus particle, raises interesting questions which I am unable to explore in detail due to space limitations. In this paper, then, I will exclude consideration of focus ni. 3.
The nature of ni as a coordinating particle A fundamental hypothesis in my analysis of the distribution of ni-XPs is that the coordinating particle ni is a disjunction, and not a conjunction3. In this section I develop three arguments in favor of this hypothesis. They are based on evidence provided by the doubling of coordinating particles in Spanish, on the ability of coordinations to occur as subjects of reciprocal predicates, and on the possibility of assigning a temporal interpretation to some coordinated structures.
3
De Swart (2001) reaches a similar conclusion regarding the disjunctive sense of the French counterpart of Spanish ni. Her arguments are based on interpretations of the relative scope of the negative operator with respect to the coordinating particle ni.
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The first piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that ni-XPs are disjunctive in meaning is that, like the disjunction o 'or' in (12), ni can occur multiple times in a coordinated XP, as in examples (1) and (9). (12) Las cartas llegarán o por avión o por barco. The letters will.arrive or by plane or by ship. "The letters will either arrive by plane or by ship." Doubling of conjunctions is possible in some languages, as the Polish example below (from Borsley 2005) shows. French conjunctions can also be doubled (Piot 2000), and so can Latin and Modern Greek (Johannessen 1998). In Spanish, however, the conjunction y 'and' cannot be doubled, as shown in (14). (13) i Jan i Maria and Jan and Maria "both Jan and Maria." (14) Las cartas llegarán (*y) por avión y por barco. The letters will.arrive and by plane and by ship. "The letters will arrive by plane and by ship." The multiple occurrence of a coordinating particle in Spanish is a characteristic feature of disjunctions, and not of conjunctions. The fact that ni can be doubled, then, is evidence that ni-XPs are disjunctive4. A second piece of evidence for the disjunction hypothesis is found in the interaction between ni-XPs and reciprocal expressions. A reciprocal pronoun can have an XP coordinated by y 'and' as its antecedent (15), but not one coordinated by o 'or' (16). (15) Fulano y Mengano se encontraron en la esquina. Fulano and Mengano RECP met in the corner 4
Bosque (1994) assigns the structure of a Conjunction Phrase (CoP) to ni-XPs. In this analysis, the coordinating particle ni is the head of a phrase that has one of the coordinated terms (the first one) as its specifier, and the other term as its complement. As noticed in Borsley (2005), however, the doubling of a coordinating particle, as in examples like (1) or (12), has been long recognized as a problem for the CoP analysis. Johannessen (1998) suggests that the initial particles in cases of doubling should be treated as adverbs, similar to English either or both, thus salvaging the status of the second particle as the head of a construction. The issue of finding the right syntactic representation for coordinated phrases, with or without a double coordinating particle, is beyond the scope of this paper, and does not bear on the argument that doubling is a characteristic feature of conjunctions in Spanish.
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"Fulano and Mengano met each other at the corner." (16) *Fulano o Mengano se encontraron en la esquina. Fulano or Mengano RECP met in the corner ("Fulano or Mengano met each other at the corner.") The explanation for the contrast between (15) and (16) is simple: the reciprocal predicate requires a subject that is semantically plural, and this interpretation can only be assigned to conjunctive coordinations, not to disjunctive coordinations. Ni behaves like a disjunction with respect to reciprocals as well, as in (17). If ni-XPs were conjunctions, sentence (17) should be grammatical as the negation of (15)5. (17) *Ni Fulano ni Mengano se encontraron en la esquina. Ni Fulano ni Mengano RECP met in the corner ("Neither Fulano nor Mengano met each other at the corner.") A third piece of evidence for the hypothesis that ni-XPs are disjunctions is the absence of a temporal reading for this kind of coordination. Conjunctions have a temporal interpretation, in which the first conjunct precedes the second one in time. Thus, a sentence like (18) means that the action of opening the door precedes the action of leaving. Reversing the order of the terms results in a nonsensical statement. (18) Fulano abrió la puerta y salió. Fulano opened the door and got.out "Fulano opened the door and got out." The terms of a disjunction are not subject to the same temporal constraints as a conjunction. Thus, there is no common sense incongruence on a sentence like (19). Phrases coordinated with ni pattern with disjunctions in this respect as well, as shown in (20). (19) Fulano salió o abrió la puerta. Fulano got.out or opened the door "Fulano either got out or opened the door." 5
Moreover, reciprocal predicates cannot take arguments that receive a distributive interpretation. Ni-XPs and disjunctions share this semantic property, while conjunctions do not (I am indebted to a reviewer for bringing up this point).
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(20) Fulano ni salió ni abrió la puerta. Fulano ni got.out ni opened the door "Fulano neither got out nor opened the door." Having shown that ni-XPs are disjunctions, I will argue that their limited distribution is the result of a potential conflict between their semantics and a pragmatic requirement that statements containing ni-XPs be more informative than contextually salient alternatives. In negative contexts the pragmatic requirement can be satisfied. 4.
The W/S account of negative polarity The semantic theory of polarity sensitivity I assume in this work has its roots in Ladusaw's (1979) semantic account of the distribution of NPIs like English anything. Ladusaw argues that the operators that licenses the NPI (also referred to as the 'trigger') are downward-entailing (DE), defined below in (21). Negation is downward-entailing, as the formula in (22) shows. (21) Downwardentailing operator: An operator Op is downwardentailing iff p ⊃ q = Op(q) ⊃ Op(p). (22) (P → Q) ≡ (¬Q → ¬P) Ladusaw's semantic approach to negative polarity has inspired a fruitful line of research, which also extends to negation in the Romance languages and other negative concord languages. Many have noticed that the class of operators that license n-words in negative concord languages tend to be a sub-set of the downward-entailing ones (Ladusaw 1992, De Swart 2001). According to Giannakidou (1998), the triggers that license NPIs in negative concord languages like Spanish and Greek (on which most of her research is focused) share the semantic property of being 'nonveridical', a semantic concept introduced in Zwarts' (1995) analysis of Dutch and English polarity, and defined in (23). Given the scope of this paper, however, the distinction between DE and nonveridical operators will be glossed over. (23) Nonveridical operator: An operator Op is nonveridical iff Op(p) ⊃ p is not a logically valid statement. Kadmon and Landman (1993) suggest that NPIs are restricted to appear in the scope of DE operators because the entailment reversal that is verified in these contexts allows the NPIs to satisfy their contradictory semantic and
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pragmatic requirements. The denotation of English NPIs like lift a finger or anything, they argue, must include even the most marginal cases (what they call 'semantic widening'), but at the same time the clause with the NPI must provide more information than the corresponding clause without it (what they call 'pragmatic strengthening'). In upward-entailing contexts (i.e. contexts that preserve entailments), widening clashes with strengthening, since widening the the denotation of a term results in a statement of lesser informative value. It is only in downward-entailing contexts (i.e. contexts satisfying the biconditional in (22)) where by widening the denotation of a term a sentence is strengthened. NPIs are restricted to appearing in the scope of negation (and other downward-entailing operators) because those are the only contexts where their strengthening requirement can be satisfied, given their widening semantic value. Explanations for polarity sensitivity similar to Kadmon and Landman's are also presented in works dealing with other languages and other polarity items (Heim 1984, Lahiri 1998). An analysis that shares some of the insights of Kadmon and Landman's approach is developed in Krifka (1992). In his analysis, all NPIs are the minimal element of a 'polarity lattice', which can be informally characterized as an ordering among denotations of the same sort as the NPI. The occurrence of an NPI in a statement must make that statement more informative than alternatives resulting from a substitution of the NPI by other members of the lattice. Since the NPI is the bottom element of the lattice, this requirement (analogous to the strengthening requirement of Kadmon and Landman) can only be satisfied in DE contexts. Krifka's concern is the distinction between any-NPIs and polaritysensitive minimizers like lift a finger. The polarity lattice for minimizer NPIs is ordered according to a pragmatic scale. An NPI like lift a finger, for instance, is the lower limit of a lattice built on the basis of the idiosyncratic scalar property of physical effort or labor. Only in downward-entailing environments can an NPI be more informative than other members of the associated lattice. For the interpretation of NPIs like anything, however, no idiosyncratic pragmatic scale seems to be necessary or available. The polarity lattices associated with non-idiosyncratic NPIs are built on the more general property of 'inclusion'. In Krifka's analysis, NPIs like anything are existential quantifiers, denoting the set of properties that some thing has. This set is maximally inclusive. Suppose a domain D where there is something red and something blue. Then 'blue' and 'red' are in the denotation of something (or anything, for that matter). These properties, on the other hand, do not belong to the denotation of everything, since some things are not red (or blue).
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I will argue that this is the relevant semantic property to understand the polarity requirement on ni-XPs. To find the associated polarity lattice for niXPs, it is necessary to go back to the claim that ni-XPs are disjunctions. I interpret disjunction as the set-theoretic operation of union (∪), and conjunction as intersection (∩). The union of two sets A, B includes each set, and each set includes their intersection, as in Figure 1. Or, in intensional terms, the set of properties that A or B have includes the set of properties that A (or B) has, which in turn includes the set of properties that A and B have. The conclusion is that complex XPs coordinated with disjunctions are also the bottom element of a polarity lattice based on inclusion6. Α�Β Α
Β Α�Β
includes
Figure (1): Inclusion Lattice By associating ni-XPs with the bottom element of an inclusion lattice, their polarity-sensitive nature can be explained. A sentence with a disjunction will be less informative than all the alternative propositions associated with the other terms in the inclusion lattice, as in (24). That is, a sentence like Max saw Sandy entails (and therefore is more informative than) Max saw Sandy or Pat. (24) P(a) → P(a∨b) I assume that ni-XPs have a strengthening requirement that governs their use in any sentence. That is, the sentence with the ni-XP must be more informative than the corresponding sentence with an alternative member of the lattice in place of the ni-XP, be it one of the coordinated terms or their conjunction. But since disjunctions include the other terms in their associated polarity lattice, the strengthening requirement on a disjunction can only be satisfied in the scope of downward-entailing operators like negation, as 6
In this reasoning I am also relying on the well-known equivalence between disjunction and existential quantification. If NPIs like anything, which are at the bottom of an inclusion lattice in Krifka (1992), are indeed existential quantifiers, then disjunctions are also at the bottom of a polarity lattice, since an existentially quantified proposition (∃ x)(Px) is equivalent to a disjunction (Pa) ∨(Pb) ∨... ∨(Pn) of all atomic propositions with property P that are true in the domain Dn.
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shown in (25). In a simple affirmative statement the strengthening requirement of ni-XPs cannot be satisfied. (25)
¬P(a∨b) → ¬P(a)
5.
Conclusions My analysis of the distribution of ni-XPs is based on a simple insight: polarity lattices based on inclusion can be associated with coordinated XPs, so that disjunctions are at the bottom and conjunctions at the top. When this insight is paired up with the W/S account of polarity sensitivity, a prediction is made: there should be a class of negative polarity disjunctions, which can only satisfy their strengthening requirement in downward-entailing environments. In this paper I have argued that this is exactly what ni-XPs are. The polarity-sensitive nature of ni-XPs in Spanish, then, offer an argument in favor of the semantic approach to polarity sensitivity developed by Krifka (1992), Kadmon and Landman (1993), and others. References Aranovich, Raúl. 1996. Negation, Polarity, and Indefiniteness: A Comparative Analysis of English and Spanish. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California San Diego. Borsley, Robert. 2005. "Against ConjP". Lingua 115, 461-482. Bosque, Ignacio. 1980. Sobre la negación. Madrid: Cátedra. Bosque, Ignacio. 1994. "La negación y el principio de las categorías vacías." Gramática del español, ed. by Violeta Demonte, 167-199. México: El colegio de México. De Swart, Henriëtte. 2001. "Négation et coordination: la conjonction ni." Adverbial Modification, ed. by Reineke Bok-Bennema, Bob de Jonge, Brigitte Kampers-Manhe, and Arie Molendijk, 109-124. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)veridical Dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2000. "Negative... Concord?" Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18, 457-523. Heim, Irene. 1984. "A Note on Negative Polarity and Downward Entailingness". Proceedings of NELS 14, ed. by Charles Jones and Peter Sells, 98-107. Amherst: University of Massachusetts. Herburger, Elena. 1999a. "Lexical Ambiguity is not always Evil: The Example of nini". Advances in Hispanic Linguistics, ed. by Javier
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Gutiérrez-Rexach and Fernando Martínez-Gil, 378-393. Sommerville: Cascadilla Press. Herburger, Elena. 1999b. "On the Interpretation of Spanish N-Words." Semantic Issues in Romance Syntax, ed. by Esthela Treviño and José Lema, 89-104. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Israel, Michael. 1996. "Polarity Sensitivity as Lexical Semantics". Linguistics and Philosophy 19, 619-666. Johannessen, Janne Bondi, 1998. Coordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kadmon, Nirit. & Fred Landman. 1993. "Any". Linguistics and Philosophy 16, 353-422. Klima, Edward. 1964. "Negation in English." The Structure of Language, ed. by Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz, 246-323. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Krifka, Manfred. 1992. "Some Remarks on Polarity Items". Semantic Universals and Universal Semantics, ed. by Dietmar Zaefferer, 150-189. Dordrecht: Foris. Ladusaw, William. 1979. Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope Relations, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Ladusaw, William. 1992. "Expressing Negation." Proceedings of the Second Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory: Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics, 40, ed. by Chris Baker and Davis Dowty. Columbus: The Ohio State University. Lahiri, Utpal. 1998. "Focus and Negative Polarity in Hindi". Natural Language Semantics 6, 57-123. Laka, M. Itziar. 1990. Negation in Syntax: On the Nature of Functional Categories and Projections. Ph. D. Dissertation, MIT. Piot, Mireille, 2000. "Les conjonctions doubles." Lingvisticae Investigationes 23, 45-76. Vallduví, Enric. 1994. "Polarity Items, N-words, and Minimizers in Catalan and Spanish." Probus 6, 263-294. Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1987. "Negation and Negative Concord in Italian and Piedmontese." Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 10,135-149. Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1991. Syntactic Properties of Sentential Negation, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Zwarts, Frans. 1995. "Nonveridical Contexts", Linguistic Analysis 25, 286-312.