Neg-raising and positive polarity: The view from modals

Abstract

This article shows that the deontic modals must, should and supposed to are all Positive Polarity Items which can raise in order to avoid being in an anti-licensing environment; it also establishes that should has a dual nature, i.e., it is not just a PPI, but it is also a neg-raising predicate, which can achieve wide scope through a homogeneity inference, and that supposed to, also a PPI, exhibits a neg-raising behavior under certain pragmatic conditions which shed new light on the neg-raising phenomenon.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.8.4

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