Abstract
(A), (B), and (C) below are taken by many semanticists to be good working hypotheses:
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(A)
A sentence of the form the As are Bs is true (on its distributive reading) if and only if every A is B and there is more than one A (Russell 1919, Chomsky 1975, Evans 1977, Neale 1990).
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(B)
So-called “negative polarity” expressions like ever and any can occur only in “downward entailing” (↓) environments (Ladusaw 1981, May 1985, Larson 1990).
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(C)
Plural descriptions may contain negative polarity items, as in the following example, from May (1985):
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(1)
The students who had ever read anything about phrenology attended Gall’s lecture.
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(1)
Thanks to William Craig, Richard Larson, Peter Ludlow, Robert May, and Barry Smith for discussion.
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Neale, S. (2000). Persistence, Polarity, and Plurality. In: von Heusinger, K., Egli, U. (eds) Reference and Anaphoric Relations. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 72. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3947-2_8
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