The Landscape of EVEN Items

This paper explores the role that the scalar properties and presuppositions of even play in creating polarity sensitive even meanings crosslinguistically (henceforth EVEN). We discuss the behavior of three lexically distinct EVEN items in Greek in positive, negative, and subjunctive sentences, and polar questions. These items are shown to be polarity sensitive, and a three-way distinction is posited between a positive polarity (akomi ke), a negative polarity (oute), and a 'flexible scale' even (esto) which does not introduce likelihood, but is associated with scales made salient by the context. The analysis to be proposed should be seen as a refinement of Rooth's original thesis that negative polarity is involved in the distribution and interpretation of English even. Importantly, the distributional restrictions of the EVEN items are shown to follow either from the distinct presuppositions of the items (positive polarity and flexible scale EVEN), or from their lexical featural specification (negative polarity EVEN), a result that squares neatly with the fact that ill-formedness is systematic pragmatic deviance in the former case but robust ungrammaticality in the latter. This result supports the by now widely accepted point that polarity dependencies are not of uniform nature, and that for a more accurate description of polarity phenomena we need to distinguish between presupposition failures (which are of pragmatic nature and can be fixed in certain contexts), and cases of uninterpretability-which yield ungrammaticality and cannot be fixed in any context (Giannakidou 2001).

By deriving the limited distribution or interpretation of polarity EVEN items from their lexical-semantic and pragmatic content, the scope theory of a uniform low-likelihood even (Karttunen and Peters 1979, Wilkinson 1996) loses much of its conceptual appeal. On the empirical side, it is noted that there is actually syntactic evidence for a wide scope low likelihood even in Greek-positive polarity akomi ke. This item, however, is shown to differ in distribution and presuppositions quite substantially from English even, covering the additional space of negative polarity and flexible scale EVENs. It is hard to see how we can correctly characterize this variable behavior of even without resorting to some sort of lexical ambiguity.

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