LingLunch : Berit Gehrke

Berit Gehrke (& Elena Castroviejo)
On evaluative intensification and positive polarity

This paper is concerned with the positive polarity behavior of emphatically used intensifiers (EIs), such as *extremely*. We show that polarity is a by-product of EIs behaving like expressive items and we argue that they involve subjective evaluation as side commentaries that come with their own factive presuppositions, which are not satisfied in entailment-canceling contexts. To illustrate our point, we build on the characteristics of the Catalan EI *ben *(???well???), an ad-adjectival modifier which has been identified in the literature as a positive polarity item, but which we analyze as contributing a positive evaluation of a property ascription. In doing that, we are also able to  capture the core shared meaning with the manner adverb *well *across languages, and to explain how evaluative intensification is triggered.