Neither positive nor negative: ‘a note on apenas’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24197/ogigia.18.2015.5-26Keywords:
Polarity, Negative and positive polarityitems, Scalarity, Vericonditional contextsAbstract
In this article we address a problem raised by the adverb apenas: under certain circumstances it behaves as a negative polarity item, while in other cases it acts as a positive polarity element. After dividing the two interpretations and showing how some sentences can be ambiguous between two uses, we propose that apenas is a polarity item that does not lexically specify its orientation, but obtains an orientation from the syntactic context. Its appearance as a positive and negative item follows from the fact that in some contexts its syntactic configuration or semantic interpretation disallow one of the two polarities.
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