Introduction

Negative and affirmative polarity items are terms applied to atomic or compound expressions which are said to be polarized negatively and affirmatively respectively. Broadly speaking, they are attracted by negative (resp. affirmative) contexts and repelled by the complement contexts. The phenomena of negative and positive sensitivity are usually introduced by giving examples of members of the class of lexical items involved. The sentences in(1.1)and(1.2) contain ‘prototypical’ negative and positive polarity items respectively. 1.1

She did not read any books.

1.2

She read some books.