positive polarity "can help it"

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:15 PM -0500 1/5/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
>"People will be playing these games in a hundred years, hopefully...
>at least if I can help it."
>
>Peter Hirschberg, collector and maintainer of old arcade games. In
>interview at
>http://mindtv.org/cgi-bin/display_asset.fcg?member_id=2090;ordinal=1;file=vodind.ttml;style=mind
>Near the end, about 4:40 out of 5:04.
>
>Mark Mandel
>
Positive context rhetorically, but it's in an antecedent of
conditional, which certainly helps.
Compare:

"...hopefully--at least if I have anything to say about it"
*I had anything to say about it

Crucially, this is still a "non-veridical" environment, one in which
there's no certainty that the speaker "can help it" or "has anything
to say about it", and that seems to suffice for some negative
polarity items.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org