Negativity in Tamil: Untying the undefinable not.

Abstract

This thesis considers topics in the area of negation-NPI-licensing and the scope interaction of quantifiers with negation. No prior approaches have been able to answer questions that might lead to a standard and uniform analysis of negative polarity items across languages. We explain NPI-licensing by means of a semantico-pragmatic outlook. We consider non-truthfunctional aspects of meaning which imply that certain pragmatic conditions are necessary for a sentence to be fully understood in the context of discourse. It becomes easier to argue that negation, be it overt or covert, is the only licenser for NPIs; and chances of major cross-linguistic variation are nullified in this generalization and subsuming all categories of licensers under the nomenclature of Negative Implicature Terms. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)