Three Types Of Polarity

There can be no doubt that the phenomenon of polarity, though usually the subject of syntactic and semantic study, is essentially of a purely lexical nature.' This is evident to anyone who is familiar with the distribution of so-called negative polarity items. The fact that expressions such as hoeven and ook maar iets in Dutch, brauchen and auch nur irgendetwas in German, or the English cognates need and anything (at all) require the presence of a negative element somewhere in the sentence, is a property which is intrinsic to the items in question and must therefore be accounted for in the lexicon. If there is any doubt as to the lexical nature of this phenomenon, it is completely eradicated by the distinction between negative polarity items of the weak and those of the strong type. In order to get a clear view of the content of this distinction, one does well to take the following Dutch examples into consideration.

Emotive Intensionality, Meaning and Grammar

This chapter attempts to show how insights from the nature of emotive intensionality can be marshaled to bear on fundamental concepts about meaning in grammar. In so doing it will illustrate how the insights and implications ensuing from the analyses of data on emotive intensionality in different languages can impact the fundamental concept of how meaning is derived in natural language. Before we proceed, we can recapitulate the insights and observations from the earlier chapters. One noteworthy insight is that the emotion-perception homology in emotive expressions may run deeper at the fundamental level of organization of cognition, as indicated in the earlier chapters. Such fundamental commonalities between emotion and perception line up well with what has been garnered about the nature of emotive contents by means of an inspection of the behavior of emotive expressions in cases of logical equivalence and ontological equivalence. The emotion-perception homology, as dealt with in Chapter 2, may lead us believe that aspects of perception mirrored in emotive content also show significant regularities in having a non-conceptual character unaffected by inferences, reason and rationality. This is indeed the case in many visual experiences, such as change-blindness, exposure effect and the McGurk effect (for details, see Eagleman 2011). However, such a non-conceptual character of emotion is grounded in the fabric of the cognitive structures of emotive expressions in such a manner that the non-conceptual character of emotion has to be distilled from the cognitive structures of emotive expressions anyway. This suggests that the non-conceptual character of emotion may at least be representational but remain non-conceptual nonetheless. This representational form of the non-conceptual character of emotion may be due to emotive intensionality, as suggested in Chapter 2. Such cases of parallels between emotion and perception do not seem to be out of the way, as the fact that they have homologies at levels of organization and operation may well reflect the design principles of evolution which often run on replications and refinements of the existing structures

Introduction: Intensionality and Emotive Expressions

The connections between intensionality and emotive content as expressed in natural language will be traced to determine how patterns in the relation between intensionality and emotive expressions reveal something about the way emotion as an independent component of the human mind interacts with the cognitive domain of language. Intensionality cannot be characterized without the notion of intentionality in that intensionality has something to do with non-specificity or opacity, and this opacity has partly to do with the underdetermination or underspecification of aboutness or directedness toward objects or entities, which characterizes the essence of intentionality. Such non-specificity or opacity has parallels in both language and structures of emotive content in the sense that intensional elements in quantificational contexts show a systematic semantic variability in the way non-specificity or opacity is expressed, and contents of (emotional) affect reveal similar patterns. Another reason why two distinct but otherwise related phenomena—intensionality and intentionality—are co-defined in association with each other is that intentionality appears to be a much more primitive form of biological feature (and maybe it was also present in earlier life-forms) from which language—especially linguistic meaning—has evolved (Searle 1983). And intensionality constitutes a significant and, at the same time, baffling aspect of linguistic meaning