A Study of Polarity Items through Word2Vec: wh-so-ever vs. any

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In this paper, we investigate the role of wh-so-ever (i.e. whatsoever) in English. Traditionally, the function of whatsoever has been defined as manifesting emphasis used after a negative phrase. However, it does not explain the following puzzle properly: First, the occurrence of whatsoever is quite similar to the NPI any in that its occurrence is not limited negative context, but it can occur in downward entailing and nonveridical context. Second, unlike any, whatsoever can give rise to emphatic effect in both negative and non-negative system. Given this phenomenon, we raise our research questions as follows. First, how can we capture the proper licensing conditions of whatsoever? Second, how can we account for the core properties of the polarity sensitive item whatsoever for emphasis? To answer these questions, we examined an empirical and theoretical link between any and whatsoever. First, we conducted Word2Vec analysis (a floating-point real-valued vector representation) between each NPI and a set of NPI licensors. The result was that any and whatsoever exhibit the strikingly similar NPI licensing environments. We further showed that whatsoever has a distinct characteristic of exhaustivity, which captures the different behaviors in the emphatic effect. Our novel finding provides us with a perspective that more detailed distinction in polarity item system should be called for.

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