Abstract
Under certain circumstances, speakers are subject to so-called spurious NPI licensing effects, whereby they perceive that NPIs without a c–commanding licensor are in fact licensed and grammatical. Previous studies have all involved the presence of a licensor in a position that linearly precedes, but does not c–command the NPI. In this paper, we show that spurious NPI licensing can occur in the outright absence of a licensor, in contexts that force an exhaustive parse. We reason that at least these instances of spurious NPI licensing might be reduced to the E XH operator pragmatically “rescuing” the NPI, in the sense of Giannakidou (1998, 2006).
Full Text 
Sign-in/Register to access full text options
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Published version (
Free)
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
