Spurious NPI licensing and exhaustification

NPI licensing and head movement

NPI Licensing in Temporal Clauses

This paper offers a systematic approach to NPI licensing in temporal clauses based on a uniform analysis of temporal connectives as relations between times and relying on appropriate type shifting for compositional buildup. The quantificational force commonly associated with temporal connectives is attributed to the operators earliest and max operating on the temporal clause and effecting the n...

NPI Licensing, Strawson Entailment, and Context Dependency

The Fauconnier-Ladusaw analysis of negative polarity licensing (that NPIs are licensed in the scope of downward entailing operators) continues to be the benchmark theory of negative polarity. In this paper, I consider some of the moves that are needed to maintain its basic intuition in some recalcitrant arenas: negative polarity licensing by only, adversatives, superlatives, and conditionals. W...

Superlative Degree Clauses: Evidence from Npi Licensing Superlative Degree Clauses: Evidence from Npi Licensing

This paper concerns itself with the superlative morpheme -est and its ability to license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) such as any or ever, and in particular the compositional analysis of a puzzling type of utterance which incorporates these grammatical elements. Specifically, an embedded clause structure which appears at first glance to be a restrictive relative clause modifier will be argued...

NPI Licensing in Adjunct WH-Questions

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...