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The illusory licensing of negative polarity items has been an insightful phenomenon for accounts of human sentence processing, as its extreme selectivity has proven problematic to explain in terms of parsing principles that underlie the establishment of other item-to-item dependencies. Using speeded acceptability judgments, I provide novel experimental evidence that the NPI illusion may be restricted to a particular type of NPI—illusory licensing was replicated for German jemals ‘ever’ but was not confirmed for the attenuating NPI so recht ‘really’. I argue that this finding challenges all current accounts of the NPI illusion and propose an explanation that purports an interaction between a scalar NPI licensing mechanism and scalar properties of the illusory licensing context as the source of the NPI illusion.

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on ne¬gation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong, weak, and nonveridicality-licensed NPIs, respectively: antimorphic (not), anti-additive (no), downward entailing (hardly), nonveridical (maybe, question). Controls were positive assertions. Cluster analysis revealed seven clusters of NPIs, some of which con¬firm the licensing categorization from the literature (superstrong and weak NPIs). Other clusters show unclear patterns (overall high or medium ratings) and require further scrutiny in future research. One cluster showed high acceptability ratings only with the antimorphic and the question operator. Exper¬iment 2 tested whether the source of this unexpected distribution was a rhetorical interpretation of the questions. Results suggest that rhetoricity was not the sole source. Overall, the results show grad¬ual rather than categorical differences in acceptability, with higher acceptability corresponding to stronger negativity. The paper provides the detailed results for the individual NPIs as a preliminary normed acceptability index.

Both indicative and counterfactual conditionals are known to be licensing contexts for negative polarity items (NPIs). However, a recent theoretical account suggests that the licensing of attenuating NPIs like English all that in the conditional antecedent is sensitive to pragmatic differences between various types of conditionals. We conducted three behavioral experiments in order to test key predictions made by that proposal. In Experiment 1, we tested hypothetical indicative and counterfactual conditionals with the English NPI all that, finding that the NPI is degraded in the former compared to the latter. In Experiment 2, we compared hypothetical indicative conditionals and premise conditionals with the same NPI, again finding a degradation only for the former. Both results align with theoretically derived predictions purporting that hypothetical indicative conditionals are degraded due to their susceptibility to conditional perfection. Finally, Experiment 3 provides empirical evidence that comprehenders readily strengthen counterfactual conditionals to biconditionals, in line with theoretical analyses that assume that conditional perfection and counterfactual inferences are compatible. Their ability to still host attenuating NPIs in the conditional antecedent, by contrast, falls into place via the antiveridical inference to the falsity of the antecedent. Altogether, our study sheds light on the interplay between NPI licensing and the semantic and pragmatic properties of various types of conditionals. Moreover, it provides a novel perspective on the processing of different kinds of conditionals in context, in particular, with regard to their (non)veridicality properties.

This paper identifies the set of properties that polarity items (PI), negative polarity items (NPI) and negative concord items (NCI) satisfy in Catalan, Aragonese, Benasquese and Occitan. It shows that in Catalan, gaire ‘much, many’ is a PI, pas ‘at all’ is an NPI with enriched meanings and indefinites such as ningú ‘anybody, n-body’ come in two sets, as both PIs and NCIs. It further shows that in the trans-Pyrenean Romance varieties studied here, a distinction must be made between indefinite pronouns such as dengún ‘anyone, n-one’ and scalar minimizers such as gota (lit. drop), which come in parallel PI and NCI sets, whereas NPIs such as brenca (lit. crumb) have developed an enriched meaning. This paper reveals the different status of pas across Catalan and other trans-Pyrenean Romance varieties either as an NPI at stage II of Jespersen’s cycle, which further constrains conventional implicatures, or as a negative operator.

International audience; Clause-final negation markers (CFNMs), although typologically rare, can be found in a very wide range of languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. Given that CFNMs tend to occupy the same constructional slot as phasal polarity expressions (PPEs) and that strong semantic and often also formal links are known to exist between PPEs and negation, default CFNMs may be expected to often develop out of PPEs. However, this expectation is not borne out by the data available on the development of default CFNMs in the languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper discusses a number of cases from Mande languages where CFNMs may be argued to be historically related to PPEs. In line with the general rarity of the change from a PPE to a default CFNM, when evolving into negation markers PPEs tend to maintain the phasal element of their semantics or become restricted to certain TAM constructions. In those rare cases where PPEs may be argued to have evolved into default CFNMs, this evolution is not direct and necessarily proceeds through the addition (or foregrounding) of a free-choice indefinite semantic component (such as 'not yet' > 'not ever yet, not on any occasion yet') and the development of the implicature of an intersubjective operator processing hearer-sided expectations and presuppositions (such as 'not ever yet, not on any occasion yet' > 'not at all, really not').

A central concern in the study of sentence comprehension has to do with defining the role that grammatical information plays during the incremental interpretation of language. In order to successfully achieve the complex task of understanding a linguistic message, the language comprehension system (the parser) must – among other things – be able to resolve the wide variety of relations that are established between the different parts of a sentence. These relations are known as linguistic dependencies. Linguistic dependencies are subject to a diverse range of grammatical constraints (e.g. syntactic, morphological, lexical, etc.), and how these constraints are implemented in real-time comprehension is one of the fundamental questions in psycholinguistic research. In this quest, the focus has been often placed on studying the sensitivity that language users exhibit to grammatical contrasts during sentence processing. The grammatical richness with which the parser seems to operate makes it even more interesting when the results of sentence processing do not converge with the constraints of the grammar. Misalignments between grammar and parsing provide a unique window into the principles that guide language comprehension, and their study has generated a fruitful research program. 2022-03-23

This study explores the issues involving pragmatic inferences with prosodic cues. Although there is a well-established literature from multiple languages demonstrating how different pragmatic inferences can be applied to the same syntactic structure, few studies discuss whether prosody can determine types of alternative sets based on the same syntactic structure. In Mandarin Chinese, the same sentence containing a numeral-classifier phrase as a negative polarity item can be employed for two types of scalar inferences based on either the numeral or the noun. The sentence wo yi zhi mayi dou mei kan dao ("I didn't even see one ant") can induce two different scalar inferences: Quantity-contrast (‘I did not see one ant, much less two ants, three ants, and so on’ by drawing a contrast against the minimal quantity of one), and Type-contrast (‘I did not see an ant, much less a dog, a cat, a human being, and so on’ by drawing a contrast against the minimally surprising type, that of ants). Taking advantage of similar sentences with the syntactic structure and lexical items, our study examines whether prosodic conditions can guide people to choose pragmatic inferences from a set of options based on the same syntactic structure. The experiments of this study are designed to answer whether prosody interacts with contextual information in this grammatical structure. The results suggest that Mandarin speakers can use sentence prosody to determine which inference is intended, at least in experimental contexts that directly probe explicit awareness of prosody. Prosody does play a role in inducing scalar inferences, but contextual information can override the effects of prosody. Each prosodic pattern can evoke a specific set of scalar inferences, but quantity-contrast inferences are favored over type-contrast inferences. Our experiments show that prosodic prominence can serve as a linguistic cue to pragmatic inferences.

Resumo: Neste texto, investigamos o comportamento do Item de Polaridade Negativa “sequer” em contexto de interrogacao no portugues brasileiro (PB). Nosso objetivo com esta pesquisa e descrever a distribuicao de “sequer” em tal ambiente e propor uma semântica para esse item, buscando explicar, sobretudo, o contraste existente entre sentencas como “ela sequer ligou?” e “*ela sequer ligou ou nao?”. Para tanto, apresentamos algumas das principais propostas para lidar com IPNs encontradas na literatura, bem como alguns dos problemas que elas enfrentam, para, entao, nos concentrarmos no licenciamento de IPNs em estruturas interrogativas e tambem no funcionamento de “sequer” nesse tipo de contexto. Concluimos, com a analise desse item, que interrogativas polares, de alternativa e de constituinte ( wh ) sao ambientes propicios para o aparecimento de “sequer”, ao passo que questoes de alternativa polar (A-nao-A) bloqueiam sistematicamente a presenca desse item. Como explicacao para o comportamento observado, defendemos a hipotese da exaustividade forte elaborada por Guerzoni e Sharvit (2007) e demonstramos que “sequer” e bloqueado em interrogativas de alternativa polar como consequencia de uma incompatibilidade entre propriedades do IPN e da estrutura inquisitiva. Palavras-chave: itens de polaridade negativa; sentencas interrogativas; semântica. Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the behavior of the negative polarity item (NPI) “sequer” in interrogative contexts in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP). Our aim with this inquiry is to describe the distribution of “sequer” in such contexts and to propose a semantic denotation for this item, searching mainly to explain the contrast between sentences like “ela sequer ligou?” and “*ela sequer ligou ou nao?”. In order to do that, we first present some of the main proposals found in the literature to deal with NPIs, then we focus on the licensing of NPIs in interrogative sentences and also on how “sequer” works in this kind of context. We conclude with the “sequer” analysis that polar questions, alternative questions and constituent questions are a suitable environment for the emergence of “sequer”, while polar alternative questions (A-not-A) systematically block the presence of this item. As an explanation for the observed behavior, we defend the strong exhaustiveness requirement elaborated by Guerzoni and Sharvit (2007) and show that “sequer” is blocked in alternative polar questions as a consequence of an incompatibility between the properties of “sequer” and the inquisitive structure. Keywords: negative polarity items; questions; semantics.

International audience; This paper has a two-fold goal. First, it attempts to argue that the circumfixal nature of the negative morpheme in Moroccan Arabic supports the existence of impenetrable (cyclic) domains, as in Chomsky’s (2001) Derivation by Phase. The second goal is to propose a principled account of the long-standing puzzle of the co-occurrence restriction holding between the post-verbal negative marker {-ʃ} and negative polarity items in an adjacent domain. Applying the precepts of Distributed Morphology, my proposal consists of formalizing this restriction in the form of a general constraint banning the realization of multiple negative morphemes in the same spell-out domain, with the effects being the deletion of the post-verbal negative marker. This is achieved via postulating post-syntactic morphological operations. I show that this prediction is not only borne out in MA but also cross-linguistically.