Project B2:
Universal and typological aspects of polarity
(discontinued since 2002)

Head of the project

Staff

Aim of the project

Research in this project mainly concentrates on universal and typological aspects of sentential polarity and a range of phenomena which are licensed by polarity. Semantic, syntactic and prosodic investigation will be accompanied by systematic collection and analysis of typological data. The research carried out aims at a better foundation of grammatical theory by systematically analysing typological data from the following areas:

1. Polarity sensitivity and indefiniteness
2. Negation, focus and scope inversion
3. Ellipsis and descriptive anaphora as polarity-sensitive phenomena

Areas 2. and 3. will be accompanied by experimental prosodic studies in a selection of languages which aim at a better understanding of the functions of the prosody-syntax interface in the grammatical model.