Ignorance and anti-negativity in the grammar: Or, some NP-SG , and modified numerals
Teodora Mihoc
October 2020 

Given reference to the same domain of individuals, the English disjunction "or" and the English singular indefinite "some NP-SG" are truth-conditionally equivalent. However, these items differ in surprising ways with respect to ignorance and polarity sensitivity: While both are able to give rise to a total ignorance effect, only "some NP-SG" is also compatible with negative or positive certainty about an element of the domain—what we may call a ‘one loser’ or ‘one winner’ scenario. And "or" can take scope under negation but "some NP-SG" can’t, although both are fine in other downward-entailing evironments such as the first argument of a conditional/universal. Strikingly, comparative-modified numerals (CMNs; e.g., "less than 3") and superlative-modified numerals (SMNs; e.g., "at most 2") exhibit the exact same type of patterns, just that the effects are crossed—with respect to compatibility with certainty CMNs are like "some NP-SG" and SMNs like "or", while with respect to anti-negativity CMNs are like "or" and SMNs like "some NP-SG". In this paper I offer a fully unified account.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006120 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	In M. Asatryan, Y. Song, and A Whitmal (eds.), Proceedings of The Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 50, pp. 197-210.
keywords:	disjunction, indefinites, numerals, ignorance, positive polarity, semantics
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