Parasitic licensing of negative polarity items

Licensing German Negative Polarity Items in LTAG

Our paper aims at capturing the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) within lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). The condition under which an NPI can occur in a sentence is for it to be in the scope of a negation with no quantifiers scopally intervening. We model this restriction within a recent framework for LTAG semantics based on semantic unification. The proposed analysis pr...

Negative and Positive Polarity Items: Variation, Licensing, and Compositionality

In this chapter, we discuss the distribution and lexical properties of common varieties of negative polarity items (NPIs) and positive polarity items (PPIs). We establish first that NPIs can be licensed in negative, downward entailing, and nonveridical environments. Then we examine if the scalarity approach (originating in Kadmon and Landman 1993) can handle the attested NPI distribution and em...

Japanese Negative Polarity Items and Negative Concord

Negative polarity items (NPIs) are a class of expressions whose distribution is restricted to affective contexts, especially to the negative context (Kato (1985)). Examples of the expressions traditionally counted as Japanese negative polarity items are: kessite ('ever'), nannimo ('anything'), daremo (`anyone'), dokomo (`anywhere'), tittomo (`not at all'), and sika ('only') (Ikeya and Kawamori ...

On the Distribution and Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in Japanese and the Phase-Impenetrability Condition

The many careers of negative polarity items

Negative polarity items are characterized by their restriction to negative contexts. Ladusaw (1979) proposed that for the most-discussed negative polarity items (NPIs), licensing contexts have to observe the semantic property of being downward entailing (see de Swart 1998, for an accessible introduction). According to a competing analysis, at least some NPIs undergo scalar licensing (Fauconnier...