Lexical ambiguity & n-words: A perspective from a set theory

This paper focuses mainly on the properties of n-words and aims to maintain that Herburger’s (2001) lexical ambiguity hypothesis can be motivated theoretically. In so doing, I discuss a typology of negative constituents and contend that they can be categorized into three different types such as arguments, adjuncts, and predicates. Under the typological view, I propose that set-theoretic operations produce two ordered pairs from the ingredients of n-words, which can straightforwardly explain their puzzling distribution.