"biggie" and negative polarity items

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

It seems to me that Larry has discovered a syntactic distinction without a 
semantic difference. Yes, there may be a difference in the syntactic and 
discourse properties between positive "biggie" and negated "biggie", but is there 
really any "meaning" difference? Some of his examples are idioms that cannot be 
used except in the negative ("no great shakes"), but the fact is that "biggie" 
can be used in both negative and positive contexts with what seems to me to be 
exactly the same meaning (e.g., "That's no biggie" = 'That's not 
significant/important'; "That's a biggie" = 'That's significant/important'). 

Larry asserts that "A biggie" cannot occur as the result of Its-deletion, 
whereas "No biggie" can. I'm not sure that this is true, but so what? Where is 
the MEANING difference? Consider the following pairs:

S: I forgot to put my name on my exam.
P2: No biggie!

S: I forgot to put my name on my exam.
P1: A biggie!

Granted, the second one seems a bit awkward, but so (to me) does the very 
commonplace

S1: I forgot to put my name on my exam.
S2: No way! [= 'this didn't really happen']
S1: Way! [= ['this really did happen']

Larry asserts the following:

A:  I'm sorry.
B:  That's OK, no biggie.
B':  #You should be, a biggie.

But so what? That does not mean that the "biggie" of the well-formed 
counterpart ("You should be, it's a biggie") MEANS something different from the 
"biggie" of his B. If so, what?

The syntactic possiblities for the negative polarity items is pretty mixed 
up, it seems to me

For example, one can say

Tom did not touch a drop for the rest of his life

but also

Will Tom touch a drop ever again?

Compare

Tom's efforts to stop drinking were no great shakes.
*Will Tom's efforts to stop drinking be great shakes?

All of this is of course beside the point of the original contention, which 
was that "No biggie" is an anachronism in a script that purports to portray 
1961 American speech. Again: if "No biggie" was in use in the relevant sense in 
1970 (which it appears that it was, if not before) and if "biggie" was in use 
in the 1950s and 1960s in several related senses and constructions that are 
very close to the relevant one, it seems pretty close to hairsplitting to call 
the script's use "anachronistic"--even though the conversation that Larry's 
first post has occasioned has been extremely interesting (at least to me).


In a message dated 8/29/08 2:08:38 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:


> I continue to maintain that negative polarity items (my examples
> included "great shakes", "touch a drop", etc.) have neither the
> precise distribution nor the precise (or often even the general)
> meaning of their positive counterpart, if one even exists.  And that
> "no biggie" patterns as an NPI in that way.  In fact, "no big deal"
> doesn't quite pattern the way "a big deal" does; the former, but not
> the latter, can appear without the subject + copula in the same
> contexts.  (And compare too the French _c'est/ce n'est pas
> grand'chose_, much more common and frequent than _c'est grand'chose_.
> 
> 









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