the grammatical character of a word or phrase, such as ever or any, that may normally be used only in a semantically or syntactically negative or interrogative context
Examples of 'negative polarity' in a sentence
negative polarity
Similarly, the absence of negative polarity builds the deterministic belief that pervades the novel.
Monika Kavalir 2011, 'Modal structure in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five', Acta Neophilologicahttps://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/ActaNeophilologica/article/view/2829. Retrieved from DOAJ CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)
This effect was absent when reading hand action-related negative polarity sentences.
Marco Tullio Liuzza, Matteo Candidi, Salvatore Maria Aglioti 2011, 'Do not resonate with actions: sentence polarity modulates cortico-spinal excitabilityduring action-related sentence reading.', PLoS ONEhttp://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3037953?pdf=render. Retrieved from PLOS CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)
It has been recently shown that processing negative polarity action-related sentences modulates neural activity of premotor and motor cortices.
Marco Tullio Liuzza, Matteo Candidi, Salvatore Maria Aglioti 2011, 'Do not resonate with actions: sentence polarity modulates cortico-spinal excitabilityduring action-related sentence reading.', PLoS ONEhttp://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3037953?pdf=render. Retrieved from PLOS CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)
We therefore conclude that both negative polarity and downward monotonicity contribute to the processing complexity of negative quantifiers.
Galit Agmon, Yonatan Loewenstein, Yosef Grodzinsky 2019, 'Measuring the cognitive cost of downward monotonicity by controlling for negativepolarity', Glossahttps://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/770. Retrieved from DOAJ CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)