Polarity sensitivity as lexical semantics

Over the last thirty years, the phenomenon of polarity sensitivity has proven both a touchstone and a stumbling block for theories of grammatical representation. Unfortunately, an abundance of scrutiny does not always guarantee an increase in insight. Two major pitfalls are worth mentioning. On the one hand, as the theorist strives for intimations of universality, the complexity and subtle variability of the data are easily underestimated or ignored. On the other hand, when one considers the phenomenon in all its glorious messiness, one may quickly despair of ever finding any general explanation. This paper seeks to negotiate these dangers by considering polarity sensitivity as a problem in lexical semantics. The basic strategy builds on recent analyses by Krifka (1990, 1994), Kadmon and Landman (1993), and Lee and Horn (1994), all of which offer lexical semantic explanations for the distribution of polarity sensitive items (PSIs). The goal is to discover what sorts of general properties, beyond their common distributional sensitivities, might unite the large and apparently heterogeneous class of polarity sensitive items. I will argue that such properties are readily available for most, perhaps even all PSIs, and further that the distribution of these forms does indeed arise as a natural consequence of these properties. In particular