scholarly journals Minimizer negative polarity items in non-negative contexts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Sailer
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
Npi Licensing ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Conventional Implicatures

Minimizer strong NPIs such as ˋˋlift a finger'' are known to be more restricted in their occurrence than weak NPIs like ˋˋever''. Sedivy 1990 points to contexts with a ˋˋnegative side message'' in which ˋˋlift a finger'' can occur but ˋˋever'' cannot. The paper provides a short overview over the relevant contexts and proposes an extension of a representational theory of NPI licensing with the following components: First, an utterance content is introduced that enriches the primary truth-conditional content by conventional implicatures and generalized conversational implicatures. Second, ˋˋever''-type NPIs can be licensed by weak NPI licensors, but only in the primary truth-conditional meaning of an utterance. ˋˋLift-a-finger''-type NPIs can only be licensed in the scope of negation, but the licensing can be checked at the representation of the enriched meaning of an utterance.

Negative Polarity Illusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 655-676
Author(s):  
Hanna Muller ◽  
Colin Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Incremental Processing ◽  
Npi Licensing ◽  
Polarity Phenomena

Although decades of research have illuminated the licensing requirements, both syntactic and semantic, of negative polarity items, the matter of how these licensing requirements are satisfied in real time, as a sentence is being processed, remains an ill-understood problem. Grammatical illusions—cases where native speakers, as they comprehend an ungrammatical sentence, experience a fleeting perception of acceptability—offer a window into online computations like NPI licensing. This chapter reviews the findings on negative polarity illusions, their parallels (and, in some cases, the lack of parallels) with other grammaticality illusions, and the implications of this line of research for understanding the incremental processing of negative sentences as well as negative polarity phenomena more broadly.

A phase-based account of NPI-licensing in Turkish

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Demet Kayabaşi ◽  
Murat Özgen
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Theoretical Problem ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Item ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Negative Polarity Item ◽  
Npi Licensing

Abstract There is a consensus in the literature that a negative polarity item is an expression that requires a licenser varying from overt negation to questions or conditionals (see Benmamoun 1997; Kelepir 2001; Kumar 2006; Kural 1997; Laka 2013; Mahajan 1990; Vasishth 1999). However, the licensing conditions of NPIs might have different accounts, which has not been fully discussed within the literature. This study aims to discuss whether phasemateness (in the sense of Chomsky 2001 and further) might have a direct influence on NPI-licensing. Based on preliminary observations, the fact that the derivation will crash if a domain containing negative polarity items is spelled out before being licensed by a negative verb suggests that licensing of negative polarity items may have to do with their positions in the derivation in coordination with the accessibility of the spell-out domains as well as with asymmetrical c-command relationships. The analysis has also an extension and an implication as to such theoretical problem as phasehood of DPs.

scholarly journals Negative polarity items: a case for questions as licensers

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Schwarz
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Information Theoretic ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Npi Licensing ◽  
In Virtue Of

Existing analyses of NPI licensing in questions instantiate two differentapproaches. One approach holds that questions are NPI licensers in their own right(Kadmon & Landman 1990; Krifka 1995, 2003; van Rooy 2003); the other holdsthat, in virtue of their syntax, questions host silent expressions that do the licensingfor them, such as a silent version of exclusive only (Nicolae 2013, 2015) or negationnot (Guerzoni & Sharvit 2014). Based one a pattern of NPI licensing in alternativequestions, this paper presents a case for the former approach. Specifically, it offersan argument for the analysis developed in Krifka 1995, 2003 and van Rooy 2003,which centrally refers to questions’ information theoretic entropy (Shannon 1948).

Negative Polarity Items

2019 ◽  
pp. 435-451
Author(s):  
Ming Xiang
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Experimental Investigations ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Npi Licensing ◽  
Linguistic Input ◽  
Different Sources

This chapter presents an overview of the experimental investigations on Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). NPIs are grammatically licensed under a set of complex semantic, syntactic and pragmatic conditions. The linguistic complexity of NPI licensing makes it a rich empirical domain for investigating the cognitive architecture of language processing and acquisition. This chapter brings together a rich set of empirical findings to address two issues: first, during language comprehension, how information from different sources, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, are incrementally combined, stored, accessed, and continuously consolidated over time to form an appropriate licensing context for NPIs; and second, what learning mechanisms are necessary for children to acquire the complex set of NPI licensing conditions from their linguistic input.

scholarly journals Braucht niemanden zu scheren: A survey of NPI licensing in German

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Richter ◽  
Jan-Philipp Soehn
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Npi Licensing ◽  
German Data ◽  
Semantic Properties

In this contribution we will argue that negative polarity is a collocational phenomenon that does not follow from other properties of the respective lexical elements. With German data as evidence, we will follow a proposal by van der Wouden and treat Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as collocates which must be licensed by abstract semantic properties of their contexts. Using a collocation module for HPSG, which has been independently motivated for bound words and idioms, we will show how to restrict the occurrence of NPIs to legitimate environments, starting from the negativity hierarchy of licensing environments by Zwarts. Besides a more fine-grained semantic licenser hierarchy, we will establish syntactic licensing domains and general collocational restrictions of NPIs.

scholarly journals The processing of negative polarity items in Turkish-German bilinguals

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seckin Arslan ◽  
Sol Lago ◽  
Claudia Felser ◽  
Aydogan Yanilmaz ◽  
John E. Drury
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Npi Licensing ◽  
Reading Experiment ◽  
Late Bilinguals ◽  
Turkish German

This study investigates the processing of Turkish negative polarity items (NPIs) using a self-paced reading experiment with end-of-sentence acceptability judgements. Our participants included adult Turkish monolinguals, as well as Turkish-German early (i.e. heritage speakers) and late bilinguals. We explored whether intrusion effects from illusory NPI licensors extended to bilingual Turkish speakers who had acquired German either early or late in their lives. Stimuli included 30 sets of sentences in six experimental conditions, with the presence of both an NPI and of a suitable licenser (verb negation) systematically manipulated. Our results indicate that bilingual Turkish readers show intrusion effects in their processing of NPIs. Our findings suggest that the structural conditions for NPI licensing in Turkish might be degraded or less stable in heritage bilinguals.

scholarly journals NPI licensing in Jordanian Arabic: An argument for downward entailment and syntax-semantics interface

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Eman Al Khalaf
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Jordanian Arabic ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Semantic Domain ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Npi Licensing ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Right

AbstractRecent work shows that downward entailment (DE) cannot be the right semantic domain that licenses negative polarity items (NPIs). Zwarts (1995), Giannakidou (1998), among others, argue that NPIs are licensed in non-veridical domains, those that do not entail or presuppose the truth of the propositions they embed. In this paper, based on empirical facts, I argue that DE theory is the right analysis for Jordanian Arabic. I propose an analysis of NPI licensing in which three components of grammar interface: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Semantics defines the class of NPI licensors, pragmatics forces quantificational closure of NPIs, and syntax executes the licensing via AGREE between a phasal head and the NPI. The analysis contributes to the debate on what components of grammar are responsible for NPI licensing and provides a new perspective on the interface between different components of grammar.

scholarly journals Spotting, collecting and documenting negative polarity items

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 931-952 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Philipp Soehn ◽  
Beata Trawiński ◽  
Timm Lichte
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items

How Antisymmetric Is Syntax?

2003 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 516-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuji Takano
Keyword(s):  
Linear Order ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
The Right

Since the emergence of Kayne's (1994) stimulating proposal for an antisymmetric theory of phrase structure and linear order, much work has been devoted to arguing for or against his theory as well as discussing its empirical predictions. As a result, for a number of phenomena involving rightward positioning, such as rightward adjuncts, heavy NP shift, extraposition, postverbal subjects, and postverbal constituents in OV languages, there now exist both an approach consistent with Kayne's theory (the antisymmetric approach) and another not consistent with it (the symmetric approach). In such a situation, it is often difficult to show on empirical grounds that one approach is superior to the other (see Rochemont and Culicover 1997). In what follows, I describe this situation with respect to two well-known phenomena in English: rightward positioning of adjuncts and heavy NP shift. For each of these phenomena, the symmetric and antisymmetric approaches have been proposed, and both approaches can correctly account for the data discussed in previous studies. Here, I examine the approaches from a novel point of view, showing that data involving the licensing of negative polarity items allow us to differentiate them and to decide which is the right one for each of the two empirical domains. Interestingly, the relevant facts lead to different conclusions for the two phenomena. The results have important implications for the antisymmetric view of syntax.

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