The Meaning and Types of Korean Negative Polarity Expressions

This study aims to demonstrate that the essence of polarity expressions lies in the reinforcement or attenuation of positive or negative meaning on a ‘scale’. While degree adjectives inherently possess a scale as their lexical meaning, allowing them to naturally accept modification by degree adverbs to strengthen or weaken their positive meaning, we found that negative contexts require different modifiers to express negative polarity. Based on this criterion, this study proposes three types of negative polarity expressions: negative polarity expressions that reinforce negative meaning, negative polarity expressions that reinforce positive meaning, and negative polarity expressions that attenuate positive meaning. We also discuss the semantic properties of the auxiliary particle {To} and the principle by which it generates scale implicature, given that it is frequently used in negative polarity expressions that reinforce negative meaning. We also present various examples of negative polarity expressions with {To}. Furthermore, we explain how negative polarity expressions related to the ‘time’ meaning, which are mainly associated with verb predicates, quantify time, and present examples of such expressions according to the aforementioned types. Finally, we argue that negative polarity expressions can be typologized as we have suggested, but there are also cases where they are realized as different lexical expressions combined with modal meaning. We present several such examples to serve as a basis for explaining other cases.