Cover not available
Part of
The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast: Theoretical, empirical, and typological approaches
Edited by Christine Dimroth and Stefan Sudhoff
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 249] 2018
► pp. 9–54

From polarity focus to salient polarity

From things to processes

| University of Münster
| SOAS University of London
The paper provides arguments against the denotational approach to polarity focus (also known as Verum), which treats it as a distinct denotation contributed by the dedicated grammatical structures. It shows that the purported category of polarity focus is routinely defined on the basis of faulty analytical procedures, reification of inferential interpretations and suppression of variation. As a result, this approach cannot account for the full range of usages of those grammatical structures that are standardly assumed to instantiate polarity focus. As an alternative to the denotational accounts, the paper proposes an interpretational approach that disposes of the idea of a discrete denotation defining a linguistic category. To emphasize the difference between these two understandings of linguistic meaning, the term salient polarity is introduced. Salient polarity is understood as an interpretive effect stemming from the speaker’s intention to draw the hearer’s attention to the truth value of the proposition. This interpretive effect comes about through different inferential mechanisms and for various communicative reasons, and can be derived from completely unrelated denotations. Thus, salient polarity is not a traditional linguistic category if the latter is defined based on the correspondence between a linguistic form and a denotation, but is rather to be conceived of as a fuzzy set of family resemblances unified by shared communicative intentions.
Keywords: polarity, salience, focus, inference, crosslinguistic categories
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Salient polarity and accented verbs
    • 2.1Identifying salient polarity
    • 2.2Against form-meaning correspondence
      • 2.2.1Auxiliary constructions
      • 2.2.2Other structures in question-answer contexts
      • 2.2.3Underspecification
    • 2.3Conclusion
  • 3.Salient polarity and interpretive effects
    • 3.1Accented verbs and all-given propositions
    • 3.2Conventionalized interpretations
    • 3.3Other salient polarity structures
    • 3.4Source denotations
      • 3.4.1Existential quantifiers
      • 3.4.2Miratives, evidentials, and epistemic stance
      • 3.4.3Other source denotations and a summary
  • 4.Final remarks
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 30 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.249.01mat
References
Abraham, Werner & Conradi, C. Jac
2001 Präteritumschwund und Diskursgrammatik. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ackerman, Farrell & Nikolaeva, Irina
2013 Descriptive Typology and Linguistics Theory: A Study in the Morphosyntax of Relative Clauses. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Baumann, Stefan
2006 The Intonation of Givenness. Berlin: De Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Behrens, Leila
2013 Evidentiality, modality, focus, and other puzzles. In Practical Theories and Empirical Practice: A Linguistic Perspective [Human Cognitive Processing 40], Andrea C. Schalley (ed.), 185–243. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty & Ward, Gregory
1998 Information Status and Non-canonical Word Order in English [Studies in Language Companion Series 40]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Büring, Daniel
2010 Towards a typology of focus realization. In Information Structure: Theoretical, Typological, and Experimental Perspectives, Malte Zimmermann & Caroline Féry (eds), 177–205. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2016 Intonation and Meaning. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Creswell, Cassandres
2000 The discourse function of verum focus in wh-questions. In Proceedings of NELS 30, Masako Hirotani, Andries Coetzee, Nancy Hall & Ji-Yung Kim (eds), 165–180. Amherst MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
Danckaert, Lieven & Haegeman, Liliane
2012 Conditional clauses, main clause phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis. In Comparative Germanic Syntax: The State of the Art [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 191], Peter Ackema, Rhona Alcorn, Caroline Heycock, Dany Jaspers, Jeroen van Craenenbroeck & Guido Vanden Wyngaerd (eds), 133–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, Eirlys
1986 The English Imperative. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
DeLancey, Scott
1997 Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 1(1): 33–52.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dik, Simon C., Hoffmann, Maria E., de Jong, Jan R., Dijang, Sie Ing, Stroomer, Harry J. & de Vries, Lourens
1981 On the typology of focus phenomena. In Perspectives on Functional Grammar, Teun Hoekstra, Harry van der Hulst & Michael Moortgat (eds), 41–74. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Dimroth, Christine, Andorno, Cecilia, Benazzo, Sandra & Verhagen, Josie
2010 Given claims about new topics. How Romance and Germanic speakers link changed and maintained information in narrative discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 42(12): 3328–3344.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duffield, Nigel
2007 Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4): 765–814.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 On polarity emphasis, assertion and mood in Vietnamese and English. Lingua 137: 248–270.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
É. Kiss, Katalin
2002 The Syntax of Hungarian. Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Egg, Markus
2012 Discourse particles at the semantics-pragmatics interface. In Modality and Theory of Mind Elements across Languages, Werner Abraham & Elisabeth Leiss (eds), 297–333. Berlin: De Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Egg, Markus & Zimmermann, Malte
2012 Stressed out! Accented discourse particles – The case of ‘DOCH’. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16, Vol. 1, Ana Aguilar Guevara, Anna Chernilovskaya & Rick Nouwen (eds), 225–238. Utrecht: UiL-OTS.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas & Levinson, Stephen
2009 The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(5): 429–492.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Faller, Martina
2002 Semantics and Pragmatics of Evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. PhD dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Friedman, Victor A.
1986 Evidentiality in the Balkans: Bulgarian, Macedonian and Albanian. In Evidentiality. The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, Johanna Nichols & Wallace Chafe (eds), 168–187. Norwood NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E.
2009 The nature of generalization in language. Cognitive Linguistics 20(1): 93–127.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. & Ackerman, Farrell
2001 The pragmatics of obligatory adjuncts. Language 77(4): 798–814.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grosz, Patrick
2014 German ‘doch’: An element that triggers a contrast presupposition. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 46(1): 163–177.Google Scholar
2016 Information structure and discourse particles. In Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds), 336–358. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Güldemann, Tom & Fiedler, Ines
2013 Verb fronting in Bantu in typological perspective. Paper presented at the Workshop on Information Structure in Bantu Languages, Humboldt University Berlin. [URL] (5 November 2016).
Gussenhoven, Carlos
1983 Focus, mode and the nucleus. Journal of Linguistics 19(2): 377–417.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 Types of focus in English. In Topic and Focus: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation, Chungmin Lee, Matthew Gordon & Daniel Büring (eds), 83–100. Heidelberg: Springer.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gutzmann, Daniel
2010 Betonte Modalpartikeln und Verumfokus. In 40 Jahre Partikelforschung, Elke Hentschel & Theo Harden (eds), 119–138. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar
2012 Verum – Fokus – Verum-Fokus? Fokus-basierte und lexikalische Ansätze. In Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation, Horst Lohnstein & Hardarik Blühdorn (eds), 67–103. Hamburg: Buske.Google Scholar
Gutzmann, Daniel & Castroviejo Miró, Elena
2011 The dimensions of VERUM. In Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 8, Olivier Bonami & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (eds), 143–165. Paris: CSSP.Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K.
1967 Notes on transitivity and theme in English: Parts 1–2. Journal of Linguistics 3(1–2): 37–81, 177–274.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin
2010 Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in cross-linguistic studies. Language 86(4): 663–687.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Höhle, Tilman N.
1992 Über Verum-Fokus im Deutschen. In Informationsstruktur und Grammatik, Joachim Jacobs (ed.), 112–141. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyman, Larry & Watters, John R.
1984 Auxiliary focus. Studies in African Linguistics 15(3): 233–273.Google Scholar
Kandybowicz, Jason
2013 Ways of emphatic scope-taking: From emphatic assertion in Nupe to the grammar of emphasis. Lingua 128: 51–71.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klein, Wolfgang
1994 Time in Language. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Klima, Eduard S.
1964 Negation in English. In The Structure of Language, Jerry Fodor & Jerold Katz (eds), 246–323. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred
2008 Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55(3–4): 243–276.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kurilov, Gavril
2005 Fol’klor jukagirov. Novosibirsk: Nauka.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert
2008 Intonational Phonology, 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lai, Catherine
2012 Rises all the way up: The Interpretation of Prosody, Discourse Attitudes and Dialogue Structure. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Laka, Itziar
1994 On the Syntax of Negation. New York NY: Garland.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud
1994 Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen
2000 Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lipták, Anikó
2013 The syntax of emphatic positive polarity in Hungarian: Evidence from ellipsis. Lingua 128: 72–94.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lohnstein, Horst
2012 Verumfokus – Satzmodus – Wahrheit. In Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation, Horst Lohnstein & Hardarik Blühdorn (eds), 31–67. Google Scholar
2016 Verum focus. In Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds), 290–313. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Maslova, Elena
2001 Yukaghir Texts. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
2003 Tundra Yukaghir. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Matić, Dejan
2003 Topics, Presuppositions, and Theticity: An Empirical Study of VS Clauses in Albanian, Modern Greek, and Serbo-Croat. PhD dissertation, University of Cologne.Google Scholar
2009 On the variability of focus meanings. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists, Seoul 2008. Seoul: Linguistic Society of Korea.
2010 Discourse and syntax in linguistic change: Ratified topics in Serbian/Croatian. In Diachronic Studies on Information Structure, Gisella Ferraresi & Rosemarie Lühr (eds), 117–142. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2015 Tag questions and focus markers: Evidence from the Tompo dialect of Even. In Information Structure and Spoken Language in a Cross-linguistic Perspective, Jocelyne M. M. Fernandez-Vest & Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (eds), 167–189. Berlin: De Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matić, Dejan & Nikolaeva, Irina
2008 Predicate focus and the particle mə(r)= in Tundra Yukaghir. Paper presented at Predicate Focus Workshop, University of Potsdam.
2014 Realis mood, focus, and existential closure in Tundra Yukaghir. Lingua 150: 202–231.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matić, Dejan & Wedgwood, Daniel
2013 The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretation-based category in cross-linguistic analysis. Journal of Linguistics 49(1): 127–163.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matthews, Peter
1981 Syntax. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Meibauer, Jörg
2014 Lying at the Semantics-pragmatics Interface. Berlin: De Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Merin, Arthur & Nikolaeva, Irina
2008 Exclamative as a universal speech act category: A case study in decision-theoretic semantics and typological implications. Ms. [URL] (20 November 2016).
Mišković-Luković, Mirjana
2010 Markers of conceptual adjustment. Serbian particles ‘baš’ and ‘kao’. In South Slavic Discourse Particles [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 197], Mirjana Mišković-Luković & Mirjana Dedaić (eds), 65–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevins, Andrew, Pesetsky, David & Rodrigues, Carlos
2009 Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment. Language 85(2): 355–404.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Newmeyer, Frederick J.
2007 Linguistic typology requires crosslinguistic formal categories. Linguistic Typology 11(1): 133–157.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortiz de Urbina, Jon
1994 Verb-initial patterns in Basque and Breton. Lingua 94: 125–153.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ozerov, Pavel
2012 It is not so: Nominal and ‘emphatic’ negation in colloquial Burmese. Cahiers de Linguistique – Asie Orientale 42(2): 219–285.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 The System of Information Packaging in Colloquial Burmese. PhD dissertation, La Trobe University.Google Scholar
Portner, Paul
2007 Beyond the CG: The semantics and pragmatics of epistemic modals. Paper presented at: International Congress of Linguists, Seoul. [URL] (29 October 2016).
Prince, Ellen
1998 On the limits of syntax, with reference to left-dislocation and topicalization. In Syntax and Semantic 29: The Limits of Syntax, Peter W. Culicover & Louise McNally (eds), 281–302. New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Repp, Sophie
2013 Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and VERUM. In Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-conditional Meaning, Daniel Gutzmann & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds), 231–274. Leiden: Brill.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rett, Jessica & Murray, Sarah E.
2013 A semantic account of mirative evidentials. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 23: 453–472.
Rijkhoff, Jan
2009 On the (un)suitability of semantic categories. Linguistic Typology 13(1): 95–104.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Romero, Maribel & Han, Chung-hye
2004 On negative yes/no questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5): 609–658.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rooth, Mats
2016 Alternative semantics. In Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, Caroline Féry & Ishihara Shinichiro (eds), 19–40. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Sailor, Craig
2014 The Variables of VP Ellipsis. PhD dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
2015 Polarity-driven inversion in British English and beyond. Ms. [URL] (31 October 2016).
Samko, Bern
2015 The emphatic interpretation of English VP preposing. Paper presented at: The 89th Annual Meeting of the LSA. [URL] (15 October 2016).
2016 Verum focus in alternative semantics. Paper presented at: The 90th Annual Meeting of the LSA. [URL] (15 October 2016).
Turco, Giuseppina
2014 Contrasting Opposite Polarity in Germanic and Romance Languages: Verum Focus and Affirmative Particles in Native Speakers and Advanced L2 Learners. PhD dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Turco, Giuseppina, Braun, Bettina & Dimroth, Christine
2014 When contrasting polarity, the Dutch use particles, Germans intonation. Journal of Pragmatics 62: 94–106.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Turco, Giuseppina, Dimroth, Christine & Braun, Bettina
2013 Intonational means to mark Verum focus in German and French. Language and Speech 56(4): 460–490.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watters, John R.
1979 Focus in Aghem. In Aghem Grammatical Structure, Larry Hyman (ed.), 137–197. Los Angeles CA: University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Wedgwood, Daniel
2006 Shifting the Focus: From Static Structures to the Dynamics of Interpretation. Oxford: Elsevier Science.Google Scholar
Wilder, Chris
2013 English ‘emphatic do’. Lingua 128: 142–171.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wood, Jim
2008 ‘So’-inversion as polarity focus. In Proceedings of WECOL 38, Michael Grosvald & Dianne Soares (eds), 304–317. Davis: UC Davis.Google Scholar
2014 Affirmative semantics with negative morphosyntax: Negative exclamatives and the New England ‘So AUXn’t NP/DP’ construction. In Micro-syntactic Variation in North American English, Raffaella Zanuttini & Laurence R. Horn (eds), 71–114. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zimmermann, Malte
2008 Contrastive focus and emphasis. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55(3–4): 347–360.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zimmermann, Malte & Hole, Daniel
2008 Predicate focus, verum focus, verb focus: Similarities and differences. Paper presented at: Predicate Focus Workshop, University of Potsdam.
Zimmermann, Malte & Onea, Edgar
2011 Focus marking and focus interpretation. Lingua 121(11): 1651–1670.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Garassino, Davide & Daniel Jacob
2022. Introduction. When data challenges theory. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo
2022. Distinguishing psychological Given/New from linguistic Topic/Focus makes things clearer. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 40 ff. DOI logo
Matić, Dejan
2022. Alternatives to information structure. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 92 ff. DOI logo
Ozerov, Pavel
2021. Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure. Linguistics Vanguard 7:1 DOI logo
Vydrina, Alexandra
2020. Operator focus in discourse and grammar: The two perfectives in Kakabe. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 41:1 ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.