High stakes Grammar

Polarity items and polarity sensitivity have been a flashpoint in debates about language and the structure of grammar since the earliest days of generative linguistics. While theories have proliferated and the data have mushroomed in complexity, the terms of the debate have remained fairly constant. The goal is to explain why polarity items should pattern the way they do and, more particularly, to discover what it is in a speaker's mental grammar that conditions these peculiar patterns. For the most part, the debate has centered on the nature of grammatical representation itself, and on the sorts of constructs which must be available within a theory of grammar in order to explain the complex constraints on polarity items. The significance of this debate is not difficult to see: whatever constructs are needed to explain polarity sensitivity in particular should also, and indeed must, be part of the theory of grammar in general. Polarity sensitivity thus becomes a diagnostic for the structure of language itself, and the debate about polarity items ends up being a debate about the architecture of grammar.

The very existence of polarity items raises questions about the nature of human language and its relation to cognition generally.