Introductory Course on
Negative Polarity Items: Corpus Linguistics, Semantics, and Psycholinguistics

Frank Richter, Janina Rado, Manfred Sailer

ASSIGNMENT DAY 1:

Aim:

Find six different NPIs in your native language that belong to at
least three different syntactic categories.

Method:

- Pick six to eight NPIs from the the file:

                     english-npi.pdf

- Translate the items into your native language.

- Test whether the translations are NPIs as well.

Diagnostic environments:

(i) Can the item occur in a clause whose subject is "nobody"?
(ii) Is the sentence grammatical when you use the subject "Pat" instead?

example:

(i') Nobody had the ghost of a chance of getting the job.
(ii') * Pat had the ghost of a chance of getting the job.

- Mail your results by tomorrow 11am to manfred.sailer@phil.uni-goettingen.de