"biggie" and negative polarity items

[Laurence Horn]

>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?

There is in any context in which "no biggie" can mean 'no big deal'
but "(a) biggie" can't mean 'a big deal', as in the examples I gave
(at least to my intuition; YMMV).

>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']

"way", occurring as far as I know only after an earlier instance of
"no way", is hardly commonplace.  Someone responding to the choice of
Gov. Palin as VP choice could easily have responded "No way!" but
hardly with the commonplace "Way!".  Thus consider:

ok:
A:  Guess what:  McCain choice Sarah Palin as his running mate!
B:  No way!

ok:
A:  Guess what:  McCain choice Sarah Palin as his running mate!
B:  No way!
A:  Way!

ok:
A:  Guess what:  McCain choice Sarah Palin as his running mate!
B:  Way to go!

not ok:
A:  Guess what:  McCain choice Sarah Palin as his running mate!
B:  Way!

"Way!" here is a lot like "He did so" after "He did not", only as a
second-order statement as Bolinger called it.  In any case, I don't
see this "Way!" as being either a "commonplace" positive or a
parallel to "a biggie".

>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?

I agree, part of what makes NPIs NPIs is their restricted
distribution.  Indeed, that's the original sense of the category.  Is
that not of interest to linguists?  My point here is if the
distribution of "biggie" in the context of 'no biggie' (esp. without
the subject + copula) and with the specific meaning of '(no) big
deal' cannot be predicted from the meaning of "biggie" plus the
meaning of negation (or other licenser), this is part of what
speakers know about the expression in question.

>
>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?

It's well known--there's a *huge* literature on negative polarity,
believe me--that NPIs vary in intricate ways according to their
licensing properties (strict/medium/lenient), as do triggers for NPIs
(overt vs. incorporated vs. implicit negation, rhetorical and
ordinary questions, antecedents of conditionals, comparatives,
restrictors of universals,...).  To say that "touch a drop" isn't an
NPI because it occurs (with the relevant meaning) in questions while
"great shakes" doesn't is like saying "ever" can't be an NPI because
it occurs in conditionals while "until" (with an episodic verb)
doesn't.

She didn't leave until midnight.
#If she leaves until midnight,...

Granted, "(no) great shakes" is one of the more restricted items.
There are various formal theories that seek to account for these
differences (Zwarts on anti-additivity vs. downward entailment,
Giannakidou on ant-veridicality vs. non-veridicality), but in any
case, the range of variation for the phenomenon is well-established,
which is not to say perfectly understood.

LH


>
>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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