Negative Polarity Illusions

Although decades of research have illuminated the licensing requirements, both syntactic and semantic, of negative polarity items, the matter of how these licensing requirements are satisfied in real time, as a sentence is being processed, remains an ill-understood problem. Grammatical illusions—cases where native speakers, as they comprehend an ungrammatical sentence, experience a fleeting perception of acceptability—offer a window into online computations like NPI licensing. This chapter reviews the findings on negative polarity illusions, their parallels (and, in some cases, the lack of parallels) with other grammaticality illusions, and the implications of this line of research for understanding the incremental processing of negative sentences as well as negative polarity phenomena more broadly.

A Cognitive Constraint on Negative Polarity Phenomena

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore (1994)

CAMBIAL ACTIVITY IN POPLAR WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO POLARITY PHENOMENA

Ringing experiments with the aspen poplar, Populus tremuloides Michx., lead to the conclusion that cambial activity is definitely not rigidly or unconditionally polar in its development in the root. A much greater development of cambial activity in the morphologically upward direction was obtained in these experiments than has hitherto been observed. It is suggested that the concept of polarity, applied to cambial activity as a process, must be defined in terms of a tendency to develop in the morphologically downward direction, rather than in the morphologically upward direction, in roots and stems. Polarity in relation to cambial activity in general is discussed briefly.