Broaden Your Views: Implicatures of Domain Widening and the “Logicality” of Language

This article presents a unified theory of polarity-sensitive items (PSIs) based on the notion of domain widening. PSIs include negative polarity items (like Italian mai ‘ever’), universal free choice items (like Italian qualunque ‘any/whatever’), and existential free choice items (like Italian uno qualunque ‘a whatever’). The proposal is based on a ‘‘recursive,’’ grammatically driven approach to scalar implicatures that breaks with the traditional view that scalar implicatures arise via post- grammatical pragmatic processes. The main claim is that scalar items optionally activate scalar alternatives that, when activated, are then recursively factored into meaning via an alternative sensitive operator similar…