Antecedents‐contained Deletion in Negative Polarity Items

Abstract

(1) a. That boy won’t do a damn thing I ask him to. b. Abby doesn’t have to read anything we did when we were young. c. Ben rarely grants an interview to a single reporter who wants him to. d. Jack wasn’t able to get an interview with a single person you were. e. The suspect didn’t answer a single question he was required to. These examples show that antecedent-contained deletion can occur inside negative polarity items. In the next two sections, I briefly review our current understanding of antecedentcontained deletion and negative polarity items, showing how the standard analyses come into conflict when confronted with examples like those in (1). In the final section, I show that by giving up part of the assumptions underlying these orthodox analyses, we can successfully accommodate these data without losing the advantages of the standard accounts of these phenomena.