Minimizer negative polarity items in non-negative contexts

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

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.

Subordinate Unless-Clauses

The complex subordinator unless (Cr. osim ako; Sl. razen če) introduces subordinate conditional clauses carrying exceptive meaning. It is usually assumed that unless-clauses are akin to (and replaceable by) negative if-conditional clauses, with the choice of one over the other being governed by semantic and pragmatic factors. This paper investigates subordinate unless-clauses in Croatian and Slovenian in comparison to English, primarily with regard to their interpretation, the possibility of expressing hypothetical and factual meanings, and the (non-)occurrence of pleonastic negation. Based on the data collected from referential corpora of Croatian, Slovenian and English we aim to establish not only the similarities that exist regarding unless-clauses across the three languages, but also some significant differences: as opposed to Croatian and Slovenian, English unless-clauses rarely/ /untypically express hypothetical meanings. As for the occurrence of pleonastic negation in unless-clauses, it never appears in English while in Croatian and Slovenian it is common but completely optional, with Slovenian displaying both properties of pleonastic negation – the assignment of the genitive of negation and no licensing of strong NPIs – and Croatian only one (no strong NPI licensing). Even though unless-clauses in both Slavic languages display very similar properties, their distribution with regard to negation is to some extent different: affirmative unless-clauses are more frequent in Slovenian than in Croatian, while the number of those with overt pleonastic negation is significantly smaller. We conclude that unless-clauses are an example par excellence of the fine-grained interplay of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, which primarily mediates the speaker’s communicative needs and intentions.