Linguistics 550 - Fall 2007

Exercise 6.5 The 'so' of

She does so know Chinese.

is a marker of positive polarity. It is obligatorily stressed when it appears and functions to indicate insistence on the truth of a sentence. Just like negation it requires periphrastic 'do' if and only if the sentence contains no tensed auxiliary. Thus, it is the positive counterpart of emphatic (stressed) negation:

A: Mary left for Bombay yesterday.
B: No, she didn't.
A: She did SO (leave for Bombay yesterday).
B: No, she did NOT (leave for Bombay yesterday).

One way to integrate 'so' (and the equivalent 'too') into the grammar is to create a functional grammatical category "Polarity," with two members, 'so/too' and 'not'. Here's an example of a tree that uses the Polarity category:

One issue raised by this approach, however, is how to account for the fact that 'so/too' occurs mainly in tensed main clauses and cannot occur in infinitives.