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Matić, Dejan and Nikolaeva, Irina (2018) 'From polarity focus to salient polarity: From things to processes.' In: Dimroth, Christine and Sudhoff, Stefan, (eds.), The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast: Theoretical, empirical, and typological approaches. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 9-54. (Linguistics Today)

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Abstract

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.

Item Type: Book Chapters
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics > Department of Linguistics
ISBN: 9789027201669
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1075/la.249.01mat
Date Deposited: 19 Mar 2018 14:44
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/25634
Related URLs: https://benjamins.com/#home (Publisher URL)

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