Record Negative Field Recorded on Internet


In the following sentence, taken from comp.ai.philosophy (1/5/95),
"I have also refuted your claim that the development of the brain logically leads to
  the claim that infants have any 'rights' at all."
more graphically parsed as
"I have also refuted                          <====== triggering negative
             /
    [your claim that                          <====== first "moat"
    NP     /
        S->[the development of the brain
            logically leads to
                    [the claim that           <====== second "moat"
                    NP    /
                       S->[infants have any   <====== trigger site (NPI)
                                       /
                                    'rights' at all."] ]  ] ]
                                                    NP S NP S
note the use of a Negative Polarity any in an island situated in a lake located in another island (the construction is called an "Embedded NP Complement", and is considered a very baroque structure; see Ross 1967). This is an extremely well-insulated NPI (one might even call it "double-insulated"). Given the squishy nature of NPI's (see some reference or other by Ross), one might guess it would require a really strong negative trigger.

But note further that the locus of the triggering negative in this sentence is the matrix verb refute, two S's (and two islands) above the trigger site in the Embedded NP Complement. Not only is this site syntactically remote from the triggering locus, but the semantic negation of this verb is not even overt. Rather, it is an entailment of a causative verb (refute) with incorporated negative (i.e, refute means cause to become false); to paraphrase:

     "I have caused to become false
             your claim [that [S
             ... the claim [that [S
                 ... any 'rights' at all]]]]"
{thus, by regular causative entailment, your claim is not true}

Brutus Force of the Center for Quantitative Syntax has determined that the negative field required to trigger a modifying any accompanied by an at all in a Complex Noun Phrase must be above 1800 millihorns, or 7.8 on the Nichter Scale. This value can be expected to be even higher for a doubly-embedded Complex NP locus; this, says Force, is the highest negative polarity field ever measured in an English sentence.

Research is now proceeding on eddy currents of induced doubt in isolated negative fields.


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