The Diverse Landscape of Negative Polarity Items: On the Use of German NPIs as Experimental Diagnostics

Abstract

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 negation-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 confirm 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. Experiment 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 gradual 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.

Lexical variation in NPI illusions – A case study of German jemals 'ever' and so recht 'really'

“…In addition, licensed uses of so recht were generally accepted to a lower degree than licensed uses of jemals. On the one hand, this may reflect the fact that so recht generally disprefers negative quantifiers as licensor; however, this possibility seems less likely given that previous studies suggest that negative quantifiers are highly accepted as licensors of this NPI (Schaebbicke et al, 2021;Schwab et al, 2021). On the other hand, it may reflect issues with the stimulus design, such that some of the (grammatical) materials may have been less plausible with a degree modifier like so recht than with a temporal adverbial like jemals, therefore getting rejected by participants.…”

“…Finally, NPIs show substantial distributional variation (see Schaebbicke et al, 2021 on variation among German NPIs), suggesting that their licensing constraints may not be uniform.…”