Negative Polarity in German: Some Experimental Results

Abstract

We discuss four experiments in which we investigated the acceptability of a large set of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in semantically and syntactically different environments. The first two experiments distinguish two subsets of NPIs whose behavior patterns with semantic definitions of weak and strong NPIs: One set (strong NPIs) is less acceptable in the local environment of non-anti-additive downward-entailing operators than the other set (weak NPIs), but they are all equally acceptable in anti-additive environments. In the next two experiments we use these two sets of NPIs to investigate the impact of neg-raising environments with and without intervening quantifiers on their acceptability. Weak NPIs turn out to be more acceptable than strong NPIs, and intervening quantifiers lead to an equal reduction in acceptability for both sets, without making the occurrence of NPIs in these environments categorically unacceptable. We discuss the relevance of these theoretically unexpected results for an adequate analysis of NPIs in the grammatical system.