Anything is nothing is something

Three main types of syntactic contexts and accordingly three types of indefinites may be distinguished with respect to negation and polarity. This paper investigates diachronic changes of indefinites from one polarity type to another. A discussion of the development of the indefinites in German illustrates the effect these changes may have on the entire indefinite system of a language and crucially provides evidence for changes towards both ‘more negative’ as well as ‘more positive’. Additional data from a wide range of languages further supports the conclusion that polarity-type changes are not unidirectional. The observed changes are analyzed in terms of lexical underspecification theory as the result of one of only two possible diachronic operations: introduction of a plus-valued feature or complete loss of a feature in the lexical entries of the respective indefinites.

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