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IRREALIS AS POLARITY SENSITIVITY
Dmitry Levinson Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Program In this paper I investigate the similarity between the polarity sensitive indefinite pronouns and the morphosyntactic category of irrealis. Negative polarity items, such as 'any-' in English, cannot be used in simple affirmative sentences. In English, 'any' is used with negation and other licensing environments, such as questions, conditionals, adverbs such as 'seldom', adversative predicates such as 'surprised', and more. The majority of these environments are downward monotone (Ladusaw 1980). Similar items in other languages are licensed by other environments as well, and, overall, there is much variation in the licensing conditions of the different NPIs in various languages (Haspelmath 1997). For example, certain NPIs in Greek are licensed in many "irrealis" environments, such as future, habitual, imperatives and obligation (Giannakidou 1998). '-nibud'' items in Russian are even less restricted: they can be licensed by any kind of quantification (Yanovich 2005). (1) Ja kuplju/*kupil kakuju-nibud' knigu. [Russian]
I will-buy/bought which-nibud' book. 'I will buy some book'/'I bought some book'. Many languages have the morphosyntactic category of 'reality status' (Elliott 2000). It is marked on the verb, and the typical possible values are 'realis' and 'irrealis'. Roughly, clauses are marked by realis if they denoted eventualities that occurred, and by irrealis if they denote eventualities that didn't occur. However, the exact environments marked by irrealis differ in the different languages. The typical environments are conditional, obligation, possibility, hortative, and optative (Palmer 2001:157). Future, imperative, negative, interrogative and habitual clauses also license irrealis marking in various languages. There are also less frequently observed licensing environments, such as 'infrequentative' (Chafe 1995). There are two similarities between the well-known NPIs and the irrealis: 1) the environments licensing the irrealis are also known to be NPI licensers and 2) there is much variation among languages in the distribution of irrealis, more than in comparable grammatical categories (Bybee 1998) I explore three approaches for a unified analysis of these phenomena: 1. The irrealis marker is as a negative polarity item itself (Levinson 2006). This explains the variation in the irrealis usage among languages, as NPIs are known to vary widely in their licensing conditions. The irrealis provides valuable data for testing typological generalizations of NPI distribution (Haspelmath 1997). 2. The negative polarity items are markers of the realis/irrealis distinction. This way, the difference between the pronouns 'somebody' and 'anybody' in English is that the former is marked 'realis', and the latter is marked 'irrealis'. Polarity sensitivity in indefinite pronouns is thus a manifestation of _nominal mood_, previously considered an extremely rare phenomenon (Nordlinger and Sadler 2004:783). 3. Both polarity sensitivity and irrealis marking are manifestations of the same underlying semantic notion that cannot be reduced to one of these phenomena. References Bybee, Joan (1998). Irrealis as a grammatical category. Anthropological Linguistics 40, 257-271. Chafe, Wallace (1995). The Realis-Irrealis Distinction in Caddo, the Northern Iroquoian Languages, and English. In J. Bybee and S. Fleischman (eds.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Giannakidou, Anastasia (1998). Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)Veridical Dependency. Elliott, Jennifer R. (2000). Realis and irrealis: Forms and concepts of the grammaticalisation of reality. Linguistic Typology 4:55-90. Haspelmath, Martin (1997). Indefinite pronouns. Ladusaw, William (1980). Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope Relations. Levinson, Dmitry (2006). Polarity Sensitivity in Inflectional Morphology. Berkeley Linguistic Society 32. Nordlinger, Rachel, and Sadler, Louisa (2004). Nominal tense in crosslinguistic perspective. Language 80, 776-806. Palmer, F.R. (2001). Mood and Modality. Yanovich, Igor (2003). Choice-functional series of indefinites and Hamblin semantics. SALT 15. 
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