Polarity Items Research Articles

A register approach to negative concord versus negative polarity items in English

Abstract Negative concord (NC) is used in many English varieties but usually considered ungrammatical in ‘standard’ contemporary English, where negative polarity items (NPIs) are used. In this paper, we take a novel experimental approach to the use of NC versus NPI constructions, in relation to register, sets of speech repertoires linked to specific situational and functional parameters. We report on two rating experiments with American and British English participants using interlocutor relations as a formality manipulation. Results show that (i) across both samples, NC constructions were rated as less appropriate than NPI associates, and (ii) there was a register effect in the American English data in that NC was rated less appropriate in formal than informal contexts. Our study is the first to provide experimental evidence for the register-sensitivity of NC constructions in American English.

Two Varieties of Korean: Rightward Head Movement or Polarity Sensitivity?

A strong argument in favor of the existence of rightward, string-adjacent head movement comes from Han, Lidz, and Musolino (2007). They argue that Korean language-internal variation with respect to the scopal order between negation and universal quantifier objects shows that in the variety where negation takes wide scope, the negative marker must have moved along with the verb/auxiliary to the head of IP. This would then constitute evidence for rightward, string-adjacent head movement. In this article, I argue that this analysis actually makes different predictions than have been attested in Korean. Moreover, I argue that, following a well-known stand with respect to the nature of polarity sensitivity (Chierchia 2013), these facts follow naturally once it is assumed that in one variety, but not the other, universal quantifiers are positive polarity items. This makes the attested language-internal variation in Korean less exceptional since language-internal variation with respect to polarity sensitivity is widely attested.

The acquisition of Polarity Items in L3/Ln Catalan by speakers of English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish: implications for L3/Ln development theorising and language teaching

ABSTRACT This paper provides fresh insights on how PIs (Polarity Items) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditionals) are represented in the grammar of multilingual learners of Catalan at different stages of development. It explores how this non-native grammatical system interacts with other previously acquired systems of negation and the implicit and explicit evidence about the negative system as presented in textbooks. We test 89 Ln learners of Catalan (L1 English/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese) on the interpretation of PIs in non-veridical contexts. The findings reveal that initially, learners exhibit both facilitative and non-facilitative transfer from their prior languages (L1/L2), and that grammatical restructuring in L3/Ln development is influenced by learners’ language background, syntactic context, and proficiency in Catalan. The results indicate a tendency towards stagnation and reduced accuracy throughout the learning process, especially among learners whose L1 had a facilitative effect either during initial transfer or later stages of development. These observations are discussed in the context of theories of morphosyntactic transfer in L3/Ln acquisition, as well as L3 development. The paper also evidences that the presentation of PIs in textbooks can shape and restructure learners’ interpretation of these items and proposes acquisitionally and pedagogically informed criteria for the instruction of PIs to Catalan learners.

The Domains of Monotonicity Processing

Abstract This paper reports an investigation into the nature of Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing conditions from a processing perspective. We found that the processing cost of Downward Entailingness (a k a the Monotonicity Effect) is determined by the number of monotonicity reversals of NPI domains, rather than by the number of Downward-Entailing (DE) operators. This conclusion is not based on the standard judgment paradigm, but rather, on the measurement of continuous variables (error rates, Reaction Times (RTs)) in a verification task, in which the truth value of a sentence is determined against a scenario. We conducted two experiments with sentences that contained one or two DE operators, which featured in different syntactic configurations. We explored how RT is affected by the manipulation of both the number of DE operators, and the syntactic environments in which they reside. We ran these experiments in Hebrew and in English, with different participant populations and different testing methods. Despite the linguistic subtlety of the theoretical issues, our results were remarkably sharp, leading to two firm conclusions: (i) that processing time is determined not by the number of DE operators, but rather, by the monotonicity of the minimal constituent in which they reside; (ii) that DE-ness is not a property of operators, but of environments. We show how our results bear directly on the current debate about the nature of monotonicity, which we describe below. Finally, we provide quantitative tests of alternative, non-semantic explanations, and show how our results do not support them.

Establishing the limits between Polarity Sensitivity, Negative Polarity and Negative Concord

Abstract In this paper, by focussing on the behaviour of polarity elements from a variety of languages from different language families (namely, Basque, Hindi, English, Romanian, Spanish, Greek, Czech, and Russian) we investigate the relationship between Polarity Sensitive Items (PSIs) and Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) on the one hand, and between PSIs and Negative Concord items (NCIs) on the other. Based on a number of contrasts that we find, we argue that: (i) if a language has PSIs it does not necessarily have NCIs; (ii) PSIs need to be distinguished from NPIs; (iii) NCIs emerge as a subtype of PSIs, not of NPIs; and (iv) all languages that show Negative Concord (NC) also have Polarity Sensitivity (PS), but the opposite does not hold. We thus postulate that PS is a general phenomenon across languages with Negative Polarity (NPol) and NC as possible subtypes of PS but independent among them, and argue against the standard hypothesis that NC is a special subtype of NPol.

영어 부정극어 발화유형 비교

This study investigated the speech acts of Korean adolescents, focusing on the English negative polarity item(NPI) ‘any’, which, unlike Korean, exhibits subject-object asymmetry. Specifically, differences in speech rates of NPIs and indefinite pronouns were confirmed in the subject and object positions. English NPIs mainly appear in negative contexts and conditional sentences, and since they must comply with the C-command conditions, indefinite pronouns mainly appear in the subject position, and relatively both NPIs and indefinite pronouns appear in the object position. Focusing on these basic theories, this study checked what they were like in practice. Overall, the rate of utterance of indefinite pronouns in the subject position was much higher than that of NPIs. And the fact that the rate of utterance of indefinite pronouns increases with age may be a result of learning. In the object position, the rate of utterance of indefinite pronouns was found to be similar and slightly higher than that of NPIs. This means that participants may know through learning or innately that both NPIs and indefinite pronouns are possible in the object position. It was found that the younger Korean adolescents were, the more familiar they were with the use of NPIs with the negative word ‘not’, and the less familiar they were with the use of indefinite pronouns with negative connotation. This is believed to be proportional to the frequency of appearance of ‘not’, which is commonly used in negative sentences in a second language environment.

Spanish Negative Concord Items: Experimental Evidence for Their Status as Strict Negative Polarity Items

This study investigates the semantic status of Spanish Negative Concord Items (NCIs) through their comparison with English Negative Quantifiers (NQs) and Polarity Items (PIs) in acceptability judgment tasks conducted among native speakers of Spanish and English. NCIs exhibit a dual behavior depending on their syntactic context, which has resulted in various analyses that categorize them as NQs, PIs, or non-negative indefinites. The findings from this investigation provide experimental confirmation that Spanish NCIs behave like strict Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) or indefinites that are exclusively licensed by a syntactically local anti-veridical operator (i.e., negation). This experimental approach sheds light on the longstanding controversy surrounding the semantic characterization of Spanish NCIs and contributes to our understanding of their behavior across a wide array of linguistic contexts.

Syntax and collocations of Akan ideophonic words

This paper examines the syntactic behavior of Akan ideophonic words. Scholars such as Dolphyne (1987) and Saah (1995) have dilated on the morphological behaviors of the variant in Akan negation morphemes thus generating the syntactic behaviors underpinning the operation of Akan negation inflections. Though Giannakidou (2008) asserts that negative polarity items can be found in all natural languages, it is an aspect of negation in syntax having little studies. Following Ampofo (2015) enlistment of negative polarity items in Akan, we limit the discussion to ideophones and argue that negative polarity in Akan is a syntactic feature of ideophonic nominal and modifiers having both recessive and dominant sensitivity with respect to negated constructions. Therefore, this study discusses the syntactic behavior of ideophonic polarity to affirmative and negated constructions. Their syntactic sensitivity categorizes the ideophones into affirmative polarity items (API) with a dominance for positive verbals as a typology only collocating with affirmative verbals and the category of negative polarity items (NPI) having a dominance sensitivity for negative verbals as a typology collocating negated verbals. It considers the permissibility of ideophonic modifiers in tense aspects and its corresponding collocants. The syntax- semantics of downward entailment theory and binding theory of Ladusaw (1980) and Progovac (1988) are employed to account for the syntactic behavior of ideophonic modifiers and their resulting collocants.

Adverbial Agreement: Phi Features, Nominalizations, and Fragment Answers

We investigate adverbial agreement in Sandəmarkesə (S. Marco in Lamis, Apulia) proposing phase-bound, local agreement relations, reducible to coordination, as in past and absolute participial constructions, suggesting a copulaless analysis where arguments are subjects in a small clause. With disjunct nominals with matching φ-features, the adverb agrees separately with each part in the set, otherwise resulting in ‘non-agreeing’ forms, which we test also with negative polarity items (niʃun-, ‘nobody’ and nentə, ‘nothing’). With fragment answers, the negation scopes over adverbs agreeing with the two proposed topics: matching of the φ-features of both nouns values the negative operator with the same features. In fronted adverbs, agreement occurs when the question contains overt coordinated arguments, elements continuing a chain, and if coordinated arguments have matching φ-features. In agreement in topical contexts with fronted adverbs, agreement occurs with the aboutness-shift topic closely preceding them, rather than with the embedded direct object.

한국어 장형부정 형태소 ‘아니’의 통사적 고찰

The goal of this paper is to present evidence that the long-form negative marker ani in Korean functions as a head of the functional projection NegP. The evidence mainly comes from the following two facts. First, a negative polarity item(NPI) serves as a blocker for the focus marker in sentences of long-form negation, so any element preceding an NPI cannot be focused. Second, a subject-object asymmetry arises in NPI-licensing when an NPI is contained in coordinate structures of long-form negation, the fact of which can only be explained by assuming the headness of the negator ani.

Systematic testing of three Language Models reveals low language accuracy, absence of response stability, and a yes-response bias.

Humans are universally good in providing stable and accurate judgments about what forms part of their language and what not. Large Language Models (LMs) are claimed to possess human-like language abilities; hence, they are expected to emulate this behavior by providing both stable and accurate answers, when asked whether a string of words complies with or deviates from their next-word predictions. This work tests whether stability and accuracy are showcased by GPT-3/text-davinci-002, GPT-3/text-davinci-003, and ChatGPT, using a series of judgment tasks that tap on 8 linguistic phenomena: plural attraction, anaphora, center embedding, comparatives, intrusive resumption, negative polarity items, order of adjectives, and order of adverbs. For every phenomenon, 10 sentences (5 grammatical and 5 ungrammatical) are tested, each randomly repeated 10 times, totaling 800 elicited judgments per LM (total n = 2,400). Our results reveal variable above-chance accuracy in the grammatical condition, below-chance accuracy in the ungrammatical condition, a significant instability of answers across phenomena, and a yes-response bias for all the tested LMs. Furthermore, we found no evidence that repetition aids the Models to converge on a processing strategy that culminates in stable answers, either accurate or inaccurate. We demonstrate that the LMs' performance in identifying (un)grammatical word patterns is in stark contrast to what is observed in humans (n = 80, tested on the same tasks) and argue that adopting LMs as theories of human language is not motivated at their current stage of development.

Dimensions of variation in sentence comprehension: a case study on understating negative polarity items in German

Dimensions of variation in sentence comprehension: a case study on understating negative polarity items in German

On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord

AbstractThis article aims to better understand how Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) come into existence and how they change over time. It argues that an expression can become an NPI if its semantics makes it pragmatically useful in negative or downward entailing contexts, often because the meaning leads to pragmatic strength, but sometimes because its semantics leads to pragmatic attenuation. Special attention is given to two patterns involving pragmatic strength that can emerge historically: Negative Concord (NC) and what I call NPI Dualization. Both patterns, I argue, involve a pairing between an NPI that has an existential-like or low scalar semantics with a homophonous but semantically different expression with a freer distribution; the homophone is semantically negative in Negative Concord but semantically universal in NPI Dualization. The article argues that pragmatic strength plays an important role in the history of NPIs, both in their origin and in NPI Dualization, but is not directly relevant for their licensing synchronically. Instead, it argues for a return to the view that NPIs are lexically marked by a semantically meaningless distributional feature that needs to be valued syntactically. On a conceptual level, the article argues that historical shifts may be matters of likelihood.

Negation in Contact: French and Occitan

AbstractDevelopment of negative markers along the lines of the well‐known Jespersen's Cycle occurred in a wide number of languages. This article investigates the possibility of contact playing a role in such developments in Lengadocian Occitan. The evolution of negation in Lengadocian Occitan followed two main lines. It first developed a postverbal negative marker ges, until increased contact with French from the fifteenth century onwards meant that the language initially adopted the two main postverbal negative markers of French pas and point, in the form of their cognates pas and ponch. In the early modern period (fifteenth to eighteenth century), prolonged contact with French was a key factor in the ultimate selection of pas as the sole postverbal marker. But the pace of grammaticalisation of this marker in Occitan was quicker and went further than in French, in that from the eighteenth century pas is often the sole negative marker, and that it starts early on to appear together with negative polarity items. This means that when the preverbal negative marker disappears, negative concord is maintained, contrary to modern spoken French.

Proximity, polarity and scalarity: A semantic study of approximative sentence-final particles in Cantonese

This paper studies the semantics of Cantonese approximative sentence-final particles mat1zai3 ‘MATZAI’ and gam3zai3 ‘GAMZAI’, which have their meaning predominantly determined by the polarity of the proposition. I argue that polarity sensitivity of mat1zai3 and gam3zai3 is due to their semantics as scalar operators, with their interpretations governed by two components. The proximal component requires the realization of the proposition come close to the proposition prejacent to mat1zai3 and gam3zai3 to be true. The polar-minimal component not only reverses the polarity of the prejacent proposition, but requires the proposition to mark a point in a minimal or small interval from the low-end or the high-end of the scale. Adapting a scalar model, the close relation of mat1zai3 and gam3zai3 with polarity can be accounted for by the two semantic properties encoded in polarity items in relation to the informative value. Approximatives require scalar ordering from top-end/high-end to bottom-end/low-end, or from bottom-end/low-end to top-end/high-end of the scale, in order to satisfy the requirement of giving high informative value. The scalar analysis is preliminarily extended to English approximatives to provide a unified analysis under a scalar model for approximatives in natural language.

A new approach to Negative Concord: Catalan as a case in point

In this paper, we revisit the phenomenon of Negative Concord focusing on the Strict vs. Non-Strict divide. With Catalan as a case in point, we show that Negative Concord Items (NCIs) are not negative quantifiers (NQs) or polarity items (PIs) but inherently negative indefinites by virtue of carrying a negative feature [neg] that contributes a negative semantics to the proposition and is subject to a syntax–phonology constraint that forces it to overtly c-command Tense in compliance with Jespersen’s NegFirst principle. We argue that to satisfy such constraint, [neg] can disembody from the NCI via overt Move F(eature) to adjoin at a pre-Infl(ection) position and be Spelled-Out homophonous to the negative marker. The Strict vs. Non-Strict contrast follows from whether [neg] always moves independently from the rest of the NCI via Move F (Strict Negative Concord) or predates, whenever possible, on another movement of the NCI that places [neg] in the required pre-Infl position (Non-Strict Negative Concord) thus not having to disembody.

"No as volgude anar en loch del món": la formació de mots negatius en català antic

The article focuses on the origin of negative polarity items in Old Catalan – i.e. words only able to occur in negative environments – on the basis of nominal lexical elements which were originally affirmative items, specifically nominal elements of minimal value (pas, gens etc.). This development in the origin of negative polarity items has a cyclical character, which means that the same tendency can be observed in Latin and later in Catalan, as well as many other – not only Romance – languages and language levels. The article deals with words such as persona and cosa, which were in the midst of a grammaticalization process in Old Catalan, which was not continued later on, and others such as the local adverb enlloc, which can only be read as a negative polarity item today. The conditions for such processes are also examined, including the absence of determiners in nominal phrases which contained these elements of minimal value in Old Catalan.Keywords: Old Catalan, negation, negative polarity items, postverbal negators, negative emphasizers, nominal elements of minimal value, grammaticalization.

The acquisition of the negative polarity item any in L2 English by L1 German speakers

The acquisition of the negative polarity item any in L2 English by L1 German speakers

Processing polarity sensitivity in L2 Spanish

Recent studies in the second language acquisition of negation have focused on polarity items and their licensing contexts. Although several studies show a correlation between higher degrees of second language (L2) proficiency and the acquisition of the target L2 structures, less attention has been given to the relation between the acquisition of polarity sensitivity and different types of lexical polarity items. This study addresses this gap in the literature by measuring the processing of polarity-sensitive items under the scope of negation in L2 Spanish. Our findings indicate that learners’ acquisition of polarity sensitivity differs across different types of lexical polarity items.

성별이 영어 부정극어 습득에 미치는 영향

In this study, an empirical survey was conducted on Korean secondary school students to understand the effect of gender on the acquisition of English negative polarity items(NPIs). Age and gender were classified to find out the frequency rate of NPIs in the subject and object positions. Looking at the commonalities of male and female students, first, the frequency of NPIs was higher in the object position than in the subject position. These results indicate that Korean secondary school students have a high awareness of NPIs regardless of gender. Second, The frequency of NPIs was high in the first graders, who were in the lowest grade in the subject and object positions. This suggests that age has an effect on the acquisition of NPIs. Looking at the differences between male and female students in acquiring NPIs, a significant difference between first and third graders was confirmed in the case of male students as a result of the post - hoc test in the subject position. In the case of female students, there was no significant difference in subject and object position across all grades. In summary, first, it was confirmed that there was a difference between male and female students in the frequency of NPIs. Second, there was a difference in the frequency rate of NPIs according to the grade. Third, there was a difference in the response rate of NPIs according to subject and object position. It is hoped that the results of this study will serve as a reference for the education of male and female students related to NPIs and negatives in the field of English education. In order to generalize the results of this study, insufficient samples and cases should be supplemented in subsequent studies.