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Many conditionals in natural language tend to be interpreted as biconditionals, where the antecedent is considered the single possible cause for the consequent to occur. However, there is no consensus about the factors that provoke or prevent a biconditional interpretation of the conditional. According to the theory that we want to test (von Fintel, 2001), a biconditional reading of a conditional, 'if p, q', is triggered if the conditional is understood as *exhaustive* list of sufficient conditions for the consequent. This is expected to be the case when the question-under-discussion puts the focus on the antecedent (e.g.under which conditions will q occur?). Since the conditional 'if p, q' mentions only one such condition (p), it is perfected and thus interpreted as biconditional. Contrary to that, the conditional, 'if p, q', is hypothesized not to be interpreted as biconditional, when the question-under-discussion puts the focus on the consequent, e.g. by a question-under-discussion about the consequences of the antecedent (e.g. what follows from p?).

Anti-locality effects provide strong evidence for expectation-based sentence parsing models. Previous discussion of the anti-locality effect, however, largely focused on the argument-verb dependencies in verb-final constructions, for which a memory retrieval-based account has been argued to be equally adequate. We report on two self-paced reading experiments that compared two different determiners in German: the morphologically complex determiner derjenige ‘the-jenig,’ which obligatorily requires a relative clause, and the bare determiner der ‘the,’ which does not trigger such expectations. The first experiment did not show the expected anti-locality effect, but the reliability of our results was restricted by the experiment’s low statistical power. In a large-scale second experiment we addressed confounds in the design of experiment 1 and found evidence for the predicted anti-locality effect with the complex determiner. As the anti-locality effect found in our study does not involve argument-verb dependencies, the memory-based account cannot be extended to the current case. Thus, our findings provide novel empirical support for the expectation-based anti-locality effect. At the same time, the experiment attests to a locality-based processing cost in later sentence regions, hinting that memory- and expectation-based effects can co-occur within the same structure.

Many conditionals in natural language (expressions of the form 'if p, then q') tend to be interpreted as biconditionals ('if *and only if p*, then q'), that is, the antecedent p is considered the single possible cause of the consequent q. However, there is no consensus about the factors that elicit a biconditional interpretation of a conditional. Von Fintel (2001) proposed that a biconditional reading of a conditional is triggered if the conditional is considered as *exhaustive* list of sufficient conditions that bring about the consequent. He argued that this is expected to be the case when the conditional is considered an answer to a (possibly implicit) question-under-discussion (QUD) which requires the answer to be an exhaustive list of suffucient conditions, e.g. when QUD = "under which conditions will q occur?" Since the conditional 'if p, q' mentions only one such condition, namely p, it is perfected and thus interpreted as biconditional. Contrary to that, the conditional, 'if p, q', is hypothesized not to be interpreted as biconditional when the QUD requires an exhaustive list of *consequences of p*, e.g. when QUD = "what follows from p?".

One unresolved question about polarity sensitivity in theoretical linguistics concerns whether and to what extent negative and positive polarity items are parallel. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), previous studies found N400 and/or P600 components for negative and positive polarity violations with inconsistent results. We report on an ERP study of German polarity items. Both negative and positive polarity violations elicited biphasic N400/P600 effects relative to correct polarity conditions. Furthermore, negative polarity violations elicited a P600-only effect relative to positive polarity violations. The lack of a graded N400 effect indicates that both kinds of violations involve similar semantic processing costs. We attribute the increase in P600 amplitude of negative polarity violations relative to positive polarity violations to their different nature: the former are syntactic anomalies triggering structural reanalysis, whereas the latter are pragmatic oddities inducing discourse reanalysis. We conclude that negative and positive polarity violations involve at least partly distinct mechanisms.