Granularity in number and polarity effects

The recent literature on the polarity phenomena has revealed that vagueness and granularity have an impact on the polarity effect (e.g., Solt (2018) on approximators such as approximately, about, Goncharov and Wolf (2021) on some NP and minimizers). This work is yet another contribution to this trend, reporting an unnoticed contrast between round and non-round numbers when associated with focus particles in Japanese. In (1), the reading where "mo 'even' > neg > number" is only available for the "50 people" sentence. Our proposal is that non-round numbers compete with round numbers in computing the (scalar) presupposition of these particles.

(1) 50/48-nin-mo ko-nakat-ta                  

      50/48-CL-even came-neg-past

     (lit.) “Even 50/48 people didn’t come.” 

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