Positive polarity indefinites?
What is it about?
This paper discusses a class of so-called ‘marked’ or ‘dependent’ indefinites in Romance, (e.g. Romanian un NP oarecare, Italian un NP qualunque, French quelque N), which have been shown to display the locality, shielding and rescuing effects familiar from the study of positive polarity items (PPIs) like someone (e.g. Săvescu-Ciucivara 2007, Jayez & Tovena 2007, Chierchia 2013). Taking Romanian as a case study, I argue against a PPI-treatment of these indefinites and show that their behavior stems from their alternative-inducing semantics, a property that makes them very similar to free choice indefinites. Adopting the framework in Chierchia (2013), I assume that these indefinites activate scalar and domain alternatives (see also Krifka 1995). The computation of these alternatives is responsible for the observed inferences and interaction with negation (and other anti-additive operators). The proposed analysis suggests that positive polarity behavior may be triggered by an arguably independent property (e.g. scalarity, free choiceness).