The syntax of polarity emphasis

A crosslinguistic survey of the expression of polarity emphasis reveals that some such expressions are subject to the distributional constraints typical of main clause phenomena, while others are not. The former have received a fairly homogeneous syntactic analysis, implicating specific left peripheral projections. The non-restricted variety, however, is not analysed uniformly with some phenomena receiving a fully syntactic account and others being accounted for in terms of semantics and pragmatics.

► We discuss two types of expressions of polarity emphasis.
► One type is distributed like main clause (root) phenomena.
► This type can be uniformly analysed as syntactically encoded in the left periphery.
► The second type is syntactically unrestricted.
► This type is a heterogeneous class of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic phenomena.