And so we return, roughly, to where we started in this work – that is, to a vision of grammar grounded in communicative interaction, and of pragmatics itself as an integral part of grammatical structure. My own view is that the evidence from polarity sensitivity strongly supports this vision, but I hardly expect those who take a different view to quickly change their minds in the face of a few odd facts. I speak here of visions, after all, and how one views the facts of a matter necessarily depends on how one sees the matter in which the facts consist.

Polarity sensitivity is a complex phenomenon, but there is no reason why a theory of polarity sensitivity should not be simple. The theory I have presented here, the Scalar Model of Polarity, is a simple theory of how grammatical sensitivities can be determined by cognitive constructional semantics. The goal has been to explain both what it is that makes something a polarity item and, incidentally, why it is that polarity items should exist in the first place. The Scalar Model holds that polarity items are scalar operators and as such their denotata must be construed with respect to the information structure supplied by a scalar model. A scalar model is itself a structured set of propositions organized in a way that supports scalar inferencing.