Non-monotonicity in NPI licensing

Crnič, Luka

doi:10.1007/s11050-014-9104-6

Cited by 40 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…On the other hand, the analysis employed here to account for the distribution of PPIs hinges on the fact that exhaustification is contradiction-free, for else elements that are PPIs would systematically be predicted to be unavailable in both DE and UE contexts. While the current paper is not the appropriate venue for a deep investigation of these issues, I would like to leave the reader with some semblance of a resolution to this conflict by pointing out that another implicature-based account of NPIs that is also compatible with the present analysis of PPIs can be found in the work of Crnič (2014). Crnič analyzes NPIs as end-of-scale indefinites that obligatorily trigger exhaustification via an even-like operator (as opposed to the Chierchia's approach which takes NPIs to trigger obligatory exhaustification via E xh).…”

Section: Overview and Outlookmentioning

confidence: 91%

Deriving the positive polarity behavior of plain disjunction

Nicolae

2017

S&P

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Section: Overview and Outlookmentioning

confidence: 91%

Deriving the positive polarity behavior of plain disjunction

Nicolae

2017

S&P

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“…This is as it should be, given the known intermediate status of NPIs in NM environments (Rothschild 2006;Chemla et al 2011;Crnič 2014). Second, intervention effects were detected, in the sense that the critical target sentences were judged worse than the DE sentences (t(51) = 6.8, p < 0.001).…”

Section: Targetsmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…an environment that does not license inferences from sets to supersets or subsets. Example (i) involves a non-monotonic environment (albeit not by way of implicatures); it is known that NPIs in such environments are not perfectly acceptable (see Rothschild 2006and Crnič 2014for discussion, and Chemla et al 2011 for quantitative data).…”

Section: Negative Polarity Items and Intervention Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intervention effects in NPI licensing: A quantitative assessment of the scalar implicature explanation

Denić

Chemla

Tieu

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper reports on five experiments investigating intervention effects in negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. Such intervention effects involve the unexpected ungrammaticality of sentences that contain an intervener, such as a universal quantifier, in between the NPI and its licensor. For example, the licensing of the NPI any in the sentence *Monkey didn't give every lion any chocolate is disrupted by intervention. Interveners also happen to be items that trigger scalar implicatures in environments in which NPIs are licensed (Chierchia 2004;2013). A natural hypothesis, initially proposed in Chierchia (2004), is that there is a link between the two phenomena. In this paper, we investigate whether intervention effects arise when scalar implicatures are derived.Keywords: intervention effects; negative polarity items; scalar implicature; experimental semantics Negative polarity items and intervention effectsNegative polarity items (NPIs) are expressions that are sensitive to the logical properties of the environment in which they occur. Examples of NPIs in English include any, anybody, anywhere, and ever. A generalization that successfully captures the distribution of NPIs is that these items are acceptable in downward-entailing (DE) environments (Fauconnier 1975;Ladusaw 1979), i.e. environments that license inferences from sets to subsets. For example, (1a) entails (1b), with chocolate muffins denoting a subset of muffins, and the NPI any is acceptable. Conversely, the environment in (2) is not DE ((2a) does not entail (2b)), and the NPI any is not licensed.(1) a. Ana didn't bake any muffins today. b. Ana didn't bake any chocolate muffins today.(2) a. Ana baked (*any) muffins today. b. Ana baked (*any) chocolate muffins today.Expressions that create a DE context for the NPI, such as negation, are called NPI licensors. Just as with negation in (1), we can see that without, in (3), and the restrictor of the universal quantifier, in (4), are also NPI licensors.

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“…The acceptability of the any ‐DP in (43‐a) is unexpected on the Any Condition: The sentence is not SER with respect to the domain of any. For example, it may be that exactly two students read a book in D, but no student read a book in a certain subset D' of D. In contrast, the acceptability of sentence (43‐a), as well as the infelicity of sentence (43‐b), can be explained on the Even Approach (Crnič, ). Specifically, if sentence (43‐a) is parsed as in (44), the scalar presupposition of even , given in (45), is contingent: The fact that no Strawson entailment holds between the alternatives means that no ordering with respect to likelihood is inherently imposed on the alternatives.…”

Section: Non‐monotonicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The contingent nature of the scalar presupposition of even allows us to get at the variation in acceptability of the respective sentence across contexts and speakers: Different assumptions about what is expected in the context may lead to different likelihood‐orderings of the alternatives (see Crnič, , for more details). The distribution of any ‐DPs in the scope of non‐monotone nominal quantifiers thus does not warrant a departure from the assumption that the distribution of any ‐DPs is determined in grammar.…”

Section: Non‐monotonicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Any: Logic, likelihood, and context (Pt. 2)

Crnič

2019

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Any has a more restricted distribution than other determiners. While it is uncontroversial that providing an adequate description of this distribution requires recourse to semantics, a full description has remained elusive. This holds, in particular, due to the intricate behavior of any in modal and non‐monotone environments, where sensitivity to extra‐grammatical factors is sometimes attested. Drawing on the insights of Kadmon and Landman, and on independently motivated mechanisms in grammar, we show that such descriptive challenges can be answered without abandoning a uniform treatment of any across the different environments. The resulting picture falls naturally out of an approach that takes any to be accompanied by covert even. There are two parts to this review. Part I attends to the distribution of any in entailment‐reversing and modal environments. Part II turns to an explanation of this distribution, its predictions about the distribution of any in non‐monotone environments, and to differences between any and some allied expressions. The review concludes by pointing out several open questions left for future research.

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Non-monotonicity in NPI licensing

Cited by 40 publications

References 33 publications

Deriving the positive polarity behavior of plain disjunction

Deriving the positive polarity behavior of plain disjunction

Intervention effects in NPI licensing: A quantitative assessment of the scalar implicature explanation

Any: Logic, likelihood, and context (Pt. 2)

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