Polarity Sensitivity of "much and many" by Register Variation

10th Conference for the American Association for Corpus Linguistics

October 7th Friday

Topic: Polarity Sensitivity of “much and many” by Register Variation

Presented by Lee, Ji Won at University at Buffalo; State University of New York

    What is NPIs? NPIs refer to negative polarity items which are words or expression appeared in a limited context. The limited context could be shown in the scope of negation or in a question. If a proper licensing condition is violated or failed to be assigned, the sentence could be NPI ungrammatical. The examples provided by Lee (2010) are as follows.

(1) You know it doesn’t cost much to do it. (Santa Barbara Corpus)

(2) ?? You know it costs much to do it.

(3) Do you all have much pollution there? (Switchboard Corpus)

(4) ?? We all have much pollution here.

(5) That future owed much to the modernist dreams of women’s emancipation and individual freedom. (Corpus of Contemporary American English, 2010, Anthropological Quarterly)

(6) There was much embracing, much exclaiming. (Brown Corpus)

    Lee suggests four (4) NPIs’ semantic and syntactic features and patterns. She states that "much" in the spoken language has progressed faster in its development into an NPI than in the written register. She also demonstrated that thorough analysis of "much" occurring in different NPIs can provide with more insights about semantic features. According to Lee (2010), her analysis of "much" proves that "much" followed by a definite NP tends to be used in positive contexts. She added we can find a stronger NPI tendency in the spoken and the written resgiters.

    In the presentation, Lee emphasized that this study could be meaning in that it is one of the studies revisited the historical development of NPIs and provided explanation relating to register variation. The main point was about the English-Specific phenomena of NPI-PPI pairs and negation types.