Conférencière : Luisa Seguin (l'Université Côte d'Azur)
Titre : « I saw everyone except Sue I did not see : Deriving the polarity reversal in clausal exceptives »
Lieu : A-3316
Date : 28 oct. 2026
Heure : 12h 45 à 13h 45

Résumé :

Clausal exceptives are constructions that express an exception to a generalization and are underlyingly clausal, hence involving ellipsis, like in (1) (Potsdam & Polinsky 2018; Polinsky et al. 2024). As pointed out by early work (von Fintel 1993, i.a.) on these constructions, exceptives introduce a negative inference: (1) is true if everyone who isn't Léonie came and Léonie didn't come. More recent work proposed a more fine-grained definition: the exceptive phrase has the opposite polarity wrt that of the main clause (García-Álvarez 2008), cf. (2). 

Everyone came, except Léonie did not come.
Nobody came, except Léonie came.

In this presentation, I will discuss previous accounts of polarity reversal and provide evidence of why they fail. Then, I will argue (i) thateach clause contains a Pol(arity)P (Nishioka 2002; Martins 2013 i.a., cf. Laka's 1990 ΣP)l and (ii) that the exceptive marker is a polarity reversing operator: it ‘looks back’ at the polarity of the main clause and reverses it via Agree with PolP in the exceptive clause; then (iii) PolP triggers ellipsis. Finally, (iv) I show that this analysis easily applies to both coordinated and subordinated exceptive constructions.