Lexical Positive Polarity Items in Romanian

Lingvisticæ Investigationes. International Journal of Linguistics and Language Resources, 2007

Licensing of NPIs in Spanish varies depending on the semantics of the trigger. Nonveridical operators license n-words, and antiveridical operators license ni-minimizers. I argue that the NPIs that can occur in antiveridical contexts have a scalar presupposition, but those that are licensed in strictly nonveridical contexts are non-scalar. In this analysis, n-words are scalar (incorporating a silent ni ‘even’) in the scope of antiveridical operators. The distinction between scalar and non-scalar NPIs, I suggest, is the reason for the diversity of polarity sensitivity phenomena in Spanish, as well as in other languages.

Journal of Semantics, 2013

We discuss four experiments in which we investigated the acceptability of a large set of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in semantically and syntactically different environments. The first two experiments distinguish two subsets of NPIs whose behavior patterns with semantic definitions of weak and strong NPIs: One set (strong NPIs) is less acceptable in the local environment of non-anti-additive downward entailing operators than the other set (weak NPIs), but they are all equally acceptable in anti-additive environments. In the next two experiments we use these two sets of NPIs to investigate the impact of Neg-Raising environments with and without intervening quantifiers on their acceptability. Weak NPIs turn out to be more acceptable than strong NPIs, and intervening quantifiers lead to an equal reduction in acceptability for both sets, without making the occurrence of NPIs in these environments categorically unacceptable. We discuss the relevance of these theoretically unexpected results for an adequate analysis of NPIs in the grammatical system.

2007

Despite the large literature that has been addressing Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) (see Baker (1970), Ladusaw (1980), Linebarger (1980), van der Wouden (1997) a.o.), they still remain an important topic for linguistic research. This is motivated, on the one hand, by the productivity of the phenomenon in natural language, and, on the other hand, to the recent computational developments in linguistics, which look for ways to automatically identify NPIs in large electronic linguistic corpora (see Hoeksema 2002, Sailer and Trawinski 2006). In a negative concord language like Romanian, NPIs are in competition with n-words, the typical concord items usually appearing with sentential negation. This paper proposes an investigation of the conditions under which the NPI vreun appears in Romanian negative contexts. It argues for a distinction between two semantic roles that negation plays – ‘predicate negation’ and ‘denial’ of which the latter is responsible for licensing vreun.

The received view on the distribution of polarity items is that positive polarity items (PPIs) such as something are found in positive contexts; they are anti-licensed by negative contexts, which license negative polarity items (NPIs) such as anything. PPI some can however be found under the scope of clause-mate negation. Such a paradoxical use has been analyzed by Szabolcsi (2004) as a special case of licensing: two negative polarity licensors are required by the internal constitution of some. Some is however shown to occur under the scope of a single clause-mate negative. Single and dual negative environments are argued to depend on the same determinism. This determinism is shown to be activated propositions in the sense of Dryer (1996). Propositions accessible to the hearer characterize the contexts where some and other PPIs come under the scope of clause-mate negation in English and other languages, as demonstrated by the transferable diagnostics proposed. The reason for this correlation is that activation brings the whole proposition into the focus of negation, which does not interact directly with the PPI to produce infelicitous interpretations. A simple and general pragmatic determinism accounts for the marked character of the sequences, that allows a clear distinction to be maintained between licensed NPIs and anti-licensed PPIs.

Linguistics and Philosophy, 1996

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 1999

This paper is concerned with the syntax of negative sentences and negative polarity items (NPIs) in English and Japanese and argues for the validity of a feature-checking analysis in the framework of Chomsky (1995). It is demonstrated that the feature-checking analysis based on feature specification on Neg and NPIs can present a unified view of negative sentences and that different distributions of NPIs naturally follow from it. At the same time, it is argued that negative sentences suggest a locality condition supplementary to the Minimal Link Condition in Chomsky (1995), in support of Manzini (1998). This locality condition is incorporated into the analysis as the NEG-Convention.

2015

For some thirty years negative polarity items (NPIs) have provided crucial evidence for linguistic theory. But the various accounts of NPIs have not yet attained explanatory adequacy. The goal of this paper is to derive the distribution of polarity items (and in particular of different types of polarity items) from their semantic structure and independently motivated pragmatic principles. Section (1) provides an overview of existing theories of NPIs and their problems. In section (2), I outline my explanation of the distribution of so-called weak polarity items, and in (3) I discuss the semantic nature and distribution of strong polarity items. Section (4) offers a comparison of weak and strong NPIs. Section (5) discusses a wider range of polarity items. Section (6) is devoted to so-called „double licensing“, and section (7) to certain locality effects. In section (8) I will discuss NPIs in questions.

Language, 2006

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs , because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs.* seminal work on English negation. In earlier works the main goal has been to describe the conditions under which English PIs like any and ever appear, but recent crosslinguistic studies have extended the empirical domain of polarity and made obvious a complexity that in the earlier works went unnoticed. We now know that any is one of many PI paradigms in the world's languages, and that the various PIs are not subject to identical distributional restrictions. At the same time, in order to predict whether an expression can act as a licenser, we have come to expect a coherent and relatively homogenous characterization of the set of expressions that allow PIs within and across languages.

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a co...