Non-monotonic Negativity

The main aim of this paper is to provide a new analysis of licensers of negative polarity items (NPIs). The problems with Fauconnier-Ladusaw's downward entailment analysis have been argued since Linebarger (1980). I will show that there exists a class of weak NPI licensers characterized by non-monotonicity and exclusivity. Weak negation, which is monotone decreasing, has been known to license weak NPIs such as any and ever (Zwarts 1993). However, non-monotonic items also trigger these wideners. Exclusivity or uniqueness characterizes non-monotonic operators, such as only, exactly n, superlatives, ordinal numerals, the determiner the, generic NPs, and also if and only if clauses, hope, happy, glad and others. Many of them function as generalized quantifiers which prohibit either downward or upward entailment. As Jespersen (1917) traces the origin of NPIs back to the strengthening of negation, non-monotonic contexts also favor strengthening by these words. We begin by considering the limited distribution of polarity items. The following section presents shortcomings of previous analyses, and then, non-monotonic expressions and their exclusivity are discussed.