The Syntax of Negation and the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in Hindi

Restructuring and the scope of negation in Hindi-Urdu

“…For a class of infinitival clauses in Hindi-Urdu, we find a puzzling state of affairs with negation: a negation which seems to be inside an infinitival complement has effects typical of a matrix negation, e.g., NPI licensing in the matrix. This puzzle was already observed by Mahajan (1990), Bhatt (2005) and Kumar (2006): 1 (1) Seemingly embedded negation licenses a matrix NPI: 1 ek-bhii laṛke-ne Mina-kii madad nahĩ: kar-nii caah-ii one-even boy-erg Mina-gen.f help.f neg do-inf.f want-pfv.f 'Not even a single boy wanted to help Mina. '…”

“…Where is sentential negation (abbreviated as 'NEG') in the hierarchical structure of the Hindi-Urdu clause? We will not rely on the immediately pre-verbal surface position of nahĩ:, which is not telling by itself (nahĩ: could be a specifier attached to the left of vP or a head or a specifier attached to the right of vP, see Mahajan 1990; Kumar 2006; we address the issue in the next subsection). In fact, it is in principle possible that nahĩ: is not negative, and is instead a mere correlate of a covert sentential negation (see Sect.…”

Binding in Turkish Nominal Phrases: A Phase-Sliding Account

“…Take, for instance negative polarity item licensing. A negative polarity item (NPI, hereafter) is an expression appearing in negative contexts and requires a licenser varying from overt negation to questions or conditionals (see Benmamoun, 1997;Kelepir, 2001;Kumar, 2006;Laka, 2013;Mahajan, 1990). These restrictions on where NPIs can or cannot appear imply that they need to be in a licensing environment:…”

“…Licensing environment includes licensor and a licensee. Former accounts with a syntactic perspective tend to agree upon the necessity of a c-command relation between the NPI (as a licensee) and its licenser (Benmamoun, 1997;Kelepir, 2001;Kumar, 2006;Kural, 1997;Laka, 2013;Mahajan, 1990;Vasishth, 1999). Following Kural (1997) and Kayabaşı & Özgen (2018), NPI licensing occurs in a context where the c-command search domain is restricted to the same phase.…”

Using magnetoencephalography to investigate processing of negative polarity items in Mandarin Chinese

“…The rule that NPIs cannot be used outside of the scope of a negative element (e.g., no, nobody) has been described as a syntactic constraint (Klima, 1964;Kumar, 2006;Wang & Hsieh, 1996), because an NPI such as any requires a licensor (e.g., not) at a position that is in a higher node of a syntactic tree that directly dominates (i.e., c-commands) the NPI any. For example, the negation word not c-commands any in "the man who stood by the post did not have any money."…”