POLARITY IN THE VERBAL DOMAIN. PRELIMINARY RESULTS AND CONSIDERATIONS
POLARITY IN THE VERBAL DOMAIN. PRELIMINARY RESULTS AND CONSIDERATIONS

Summary/Abstract: Polarity in the Verbal Domain. Preliminary Results and Considerations. The paper presents preliminary results of an extensive investigation of polarity in the verbal domain of Hungarian. Polarity has manifold and wide-ranging connections to different aspects and subdomains of the language system. The present study is concerned with the distribution of polarity in the lexicon and its possible motivations. In language studies, it has long been hypothesized that negative polarity is richer in its representation than positive polarity on a lexical, constructional and idiomatic level as well. The preliminary results of the investigation show that, in the verbal domain, this is indeed the case. This is not surprising, but the nature of the phenomenon and its ramifications deserve further linguistic exploration. Other important considerations presented in the study regard the definition of polarity. From a quantitative approach, it seems obvious that affective and evaluative meaning cannot be separated from socio-cultural knowledge and subjective expectations. This last category does not differentiate itself distinctly from other, more robust cases of polarity. The connection is also strengthened by structural properties of verbs and by the negativity bias. Because of this, I believe that, besides affective content and evaluative meaning, although strongly connected to these, negative polarity verbs also encode non-preferred alterations to events, while positive polarity verbs encode preferred alterations or outstanding forms of events. For an event to be outstanding in some respect, is relevant in fewer contexts, than excelling in non-preferred ways. This explains the higher elaboration of the negative domain, but makes polarity as a verbal phenomenon even harder to grasp and define.

• Details
• Contents