Degree Attenuators: The semantics of attenuating polarity items in the degree domain

• Applicant: Dr. Stephanie Solt, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2012 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 214369516

Natural languages have a wide variety of lexical items that express degree or quantity, or that modify expressions of degree and quantity. An important aspect of many of them is that they are polarity sensitive. This proposal, which builds on the results of the DFG-funded project "Scales and their Structures", has as its goal the investigation of one particular class of polarity-sensitive degree expressions, namely those characterized by attenuating polarity sensitivity (Israel 1996). Paradigm examples of the class of Degree Attenuators (DAs) are the negative polarity item 'much' (e.g. 'Fred *has / doesn't have much money') and the positive polarity item 'fairly' (e.g. 'Fred is / *isn't fairly tall'). The hallmark of DAs is that they are comparatively uninformative, in that in the contexts where they are licensed, they produce weaker assertions than salient alternatives. For example, 'doesn't have much money' is weaker than 'doesn't have money/any money/a dime' while 'fairly tall' is weaker that 'very/extremely tall'. This weakening or attenuating character is a surprising property: better known polarity items - e.g. 'any', 'ever' and minimizers such as '(k)eine Finger krumm machen' - have the opposite effect of strengthening the utterances in which they occur. DAs constitute a large natural class, including not only vague quantifiers/quantity adverbials ('much', 'far', Japanese 'anmari') but also precision regulators ('about', 'ungefähr') and a variety of adjectival degree modifiers (e.g. 'all that', 'sonderlich', 'ziemlich'). Yet while DAs lie at the intersection of two extensively researched topics in semantics, namely degree modification and polarity sensitivity, they have received relatively little attention in either tradition. For many, there is no fully satisfactory semantic account of their scalar meanings. Furthermore, while the past years have seen the development of promising new theories of polarity sensitivity, these are focused on strengthening polarity items, and do not extend to the attenuating class. The goal of the Degree Attenuators project is to develop a comprehensive semantic theory of the class of DAs. The project will approach their polarity sensitivity via an in-depth investigation of their scalar semantics, drawing on insights from the "Scales" project. As such, this will be not only the first large-scale study of attenuating polarity items, but also the first such project to investigate polarity sensitivity from the perspective of a degree-based semantic framework. The project will have a significant cross-linguistic component, in particular via cooperation with the "Equatives" project (PI C. Umbach) under the theme 'Topics in English-German semantic micro-variation'.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants