Course Description

NPIs (ever, lift a finger) are expressions whose analysis minimally involves syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. NPIs are assumed to be licensed by negation, different degrees of negation being required by sub-classes of NPIs. There is also a fuzzy and incompletely understood borderline area of licensing environments that are not logically negative in an obvious sense (questions, subjunctives,...).

Research on NPIs long proceeded within the confines of traditional theoretical subdisciplines, but recently methods from corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics offer new avenues of investigation. In this course we begin with a data-driven approach to review our current understanding of NPIs. After discussing automatic retrieval and classification of NPIs, we investigate characteristic classes of NPIs to see which properties and licensing environments from the literature fit which classes. This will lead to the formulation of new empirical questions about natural classes of NPIs in different languages, connecting the insights from theoretical linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Corpora can provide interesting data to investigate existing theories, but they need to be checked carefully. In the second part of this course we will show how psycholinguistic methods help in (a) validating naturally occurring corpus data and (b) establishing theoretically important distinctions that are not reliably accessible to intuitions. We will discuss a number of experiments (questionnaire, reading time and ERP studies) designed to find out whether candidate expressions are NPIs at all, to determine the required strength of licensing environments and to test intervention effects. Other topics include the interaction of NPI licensing with NegRaising predicates, complement set anaphora readings induced by some quantifiers, and licensing across supposed syntactic boundaries. After reviewing experimental evidence we will return to the challenges these data present to existing theories.

Course Material

Slides, Material and Homework Assignments by Day

• Monday:
  Slides: Part 1, Part 2; Homework Assignment 1
  List of English NPIs: english-npi.pdf
• Tuesday:
  Slides: Part 1, Part 2; Homework Assignment 2
• Wednesday:
  Slides: Part 1, Part 2; Homework Assignment 3
• Thursday:
  Slides; Homework Assignment 4
• Friday:
  Slides: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

On-line Resources

• Jack Hoeksema (1997). Corpus study of negative polarity items.
• The Tübingen on-line NPI Bibliography
• Corpus-based on-line collections of NPIs of English, German, and Romanian with documentation and classifications

Papers

• Gennaro Chierchia (2006). Broaden your views. Implicatures of Domain Widening and the 'Logicality' of Language. In: Linguistic Inquiry, 37(4):535--590.
• Heiner Drenhaus, Stefan Frisch and Douglas Saddy (2005). Processing Negative Polarity Items: When Negation Comes Through the Backdoor. In: Stephan Kepser and Marga Reis (eds.), Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives. pp. 145--163. Mouton de Gruyter.
• Kai von Fintel (1999). NPI Licensing, Strawson Entailment, and Context Dependency. In: Journal of Semantics, 16:99--148.
• Jack Hoeksema (2000). Negative Polarity Items: Triggering, Scope, and C-Command. In: Laurence R. Horn and Yasuhiko Kato (eds.): Negation and Polarity: Syntactic and Semantic Perspectives, pp. 115--146. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Manfred Krifka (1995). The Semantics and Pragmatics of Polarity Items. In: Linguistic Analysis, 25:209--257.
  (Link to pre-publication version on the author's webpage)
• Timm Lichte (2005). Corpus-based Acquisition of Complex Negative Polarity Items. In: Judit Gervain (ed.): Proceedings of the Tenth ESSLLI Student Session, pp. 157--168.
• Timm Lichte and Jan-Philipp Soehn (2007). The Retrieval and Classification of Negative Polarity Items Using Statistical Profiles. In: Sam Featherston and Wolfgang Sternefeld (eds.): Roots: Linguistics in Search of its Evidential Base, pp. 249--266. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  Draft version
• Douglas Saddy and Heiner Drenhaus and Stefan Frisch (2004). Processing Polarity Items: Contrastive Licensing Costs. In: Brain and Language, 90:495--502.
• John McHardy Sinclair. Case Study of the NPI 'budge'. From: John McHardy Sinclair (2004). Trust the text: language, corpus and discourse. Ed. with Ronald Carter. pp. 140--148. London: Routledge.
• Frans Zwarts (1998). Three Types of Polarity. In: Fritz Hamm and Erhard Hinrichs (eds.), Plurality and Quantification. pp. 177--238. Kluwer Academic Publishers.