Proceedings of the Workshop on Negation and Polarity

Abstract

This volume contains the papers presented at the Workshop on Negation and Polarity, held in Tübingen, March 8 – 10, 2007. They focus on the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of negation and polarity items. Both topics have been central to linguistic study in the last few decades. The reason for this is that these phenomena are to some extent universal: Every language has some mode to express negation and some set of lexical elements or (idiomatic) expressions that can only be felicitously uttered in negative contexts. However, languages exhibit strong differences with respect to the way this is executed. Hence, the study of negation and polarity phenomena requires on the one hand in-depth studies of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in particular languages, whereas on the other hand typological research of cross-linguistic differences is to be carried out. Especially the latter involves the application of linguistic database systems to collect and categorize data, observed in either the literature or during fieldwork. These proceedings not only contain a rich collection of different investigations on the above-mentioned phenomena, but also represent what is currently going on in the process of obtaining a better understanding of negation and polarity and therefore provide a proper overview of the state of the art in this branch of linguistics and philosophy.