The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast

Last month the book The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast. Theoretical, empirical, and typological approaches by Dr Stefan Sudhoff (German Language and Culture) and Prof Dr Christine Dimroth (University of Münster) has been published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. 

The polarity of a sentence is crucial for its meaning. It is thus hardly surprising that languages have developed devices to highlight this meaning component and to contrast statements with negative and positive polarity in discourse. Research on this issue has started from languages like German and Dutch, where prosody and assertive particles are systematically associated with polarity contrast. Recently, the grammatical realization of polarity contrast has been at the centre of investigations in a range of other languages as well.

Dr. Stefan Sudhoff
Dr. Stefan Sudhoff

Core Questions 

Core questions in this book concern the formal repertoire and the exact meaning contribution of the relevant devices, the kind of contrast they evoke, and their relation to information structure and sentence mood. This volume brings together researchers from a theoretical, an empirical, and a typological orientation and enhances our understanding of polarity with the help of in-depth analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons dealing with the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and/or prosodic aspects of the phenomenon.

 

More information
To the website of the publisher