This paper presents a study on the interpretation of anaphoric reference to preceding quantified expressions in Serbian. Quantifiers not only differ in the proportions they denote but also, depending on their polarity, in their properties of assigning referential focus. In an off-line judgement task, we investigated the focus properties of four Serbian quantifiers. The results show that positive and negative quantifiers behave differently and focus different discourse referents. This is in line with what we know from other languages. However, Serbian differs from English in that negative quantifiers are more open to different set focuses. Our conclusion from the study is that negative and positive quantified expressions in Serbian show, in principle, the same categorical differences that we find in other languages. The effect of polarity on referential focus seems to be an effect not particular to English. However, there are subtle differences between negative quantifiers in Serbian and English.

This paper is concerned with the SALIENCE of discourse referents from both a hearer and a speaker perspective in the context of negative quantifying expressions (e.g. not all, few) in Swedish. In three sentence completion studies we investigated what discourse referent is most salient from each of these perspectives and how salience is affected by the syntactic form/semantic type (entity vs. proposition) of the sentence topic in the continuation. We also investigated what morphosyntactic forms are used to refer back to referents of different information structural status. The studies were specifically set up to allow us to distinguish between the two perspectives on salience, unlike previous studies on English, which have only taken hearer-salience into account. The emerging picture of what discourse referent is most salient for negative quantifying expressions is therefore more complex than what previous studies have shown. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Sentences with quantified expressions involve mental representations of sets of individuals for which some property holds (the reference set), as well as of sets for which the property does not hold (the complement set). Both sets can receive discourse focus with negative quantifiers, while the reference set is strongly preferred with positive quantifiers, complement set focus however being possible if contextually motivated. In an offline semantic plausibility study and two online EEG studies, we investigated whether the complement set is an available discourse entity inherently for positive quantifiers, as it is for negative quantifiers. The results show that while the default focus patterns induced by positive and negative quantifiers are robust, both complement and reference set are represented as discourse entities and this is to our knowledge the first study to show that even positive quantifiers make both reference and complement set mentally rep-resented during discourse processing without contextual influence. We also discuss the impact the results from the two ERP studies have on the functional interpretation of two well known ERP effects: the N400 and the P600.

In this paper we report the results from two small-scale studies on monotone decreasing (negative) quantifying expressions (QEs) and their negative polarity properties. Some approaches to QEs view polarity item licensing and clause polarity (affirmation/denial) as distinct phenomena. Here, we investigate if this distinction holds for monotone decreasing QEa. In two studies (one on English and one on Swedish), we tested to what extent the abilities of QEs to license negative polarity items (NPIs) and to give rise to clause level denials go hand in hand. Native speakers of English and Swedish rated sentences with quantified subjects (e.g. few, not all) and NPIs (e.g. yet, until) or polarity sensitive material. The results show that other dimensions of negativity are subject to variation within each language but seem to follow each other to a high degree across the two languages, and that QEs with the same logical properties can still be negative to different degrees.

This paper investigates the apparent near-optionality of the perfect auxiliary ha (‘have’) in Swedish. Restrictions on the near-optionality of ha-omission are typically recognized in the previous literature as lexical or structural. The paper scrutinizes the viability of these restrictions by means of corpus data. Most of these restrictions are shown not to hold. Instead, the paper defends the view that the optionality of the perfect auxiliary ha in Swedish is linked to whether the clause it occurs in requires a finite feature or not, and whether ha is the only element that can supply a value for this feature. The phenomenon of ha-omission is accounted for in the syntactic frame work LFG. It is shown that ha can only be omitted if another element in the clause can provide a value for the finite feature.