Remarks on the Polar Orientation of Almost

Following Horn (2002), I will refer to (1) as the proximal meaning component of almost, while (2) will be called the polar component. With respect to (1), the obvious question arises what it means exactly to be close to something and on what scale this notion of proximity is measured. With respect to (2), a more pragmatic question is salient, namely whether the denial of the complement of almost is asserted, presupposed, or conventionally or conversationally implicated. In this paper, I will focus on what predictions different analyses of the two meaning components illustrated in (1) and (2) make with respect to what may be called the polar orientation of almost and which manifests itself in two distinct ways. First of all, despite the negative polar component, utterances with almost do not seem to make this negative aspect very prominent. Consider (3).