Positively Polar

Positive Polarity Items cannot appear in the scope of a clausemate negation. This statement stands in need of a double qualification. For one thing, not all negative environments are alike, and some PPIs can occur in one type of negative environment but not the other. I argue that indefinite NPs with a are PPIs of the weakest type, and therefore only incompatible with the weakest of negative contexts, basically those instantiated by the negative adverb not . Second, indefinites with a can be found to occur in the syntactic scope of not . This happens under either of two conditions: on the one hand, not may signal metalinguistic negation, which differs substantially from ordinary negation. On the other hand, the indefinite may (in a language like English at least) take semantic scope over not . The latter strategy is unavailable in a scrambling language like Dutch, where the indefinite can move overtly to a syntactic position having scope over the negative adverb.