Linguistisches Kolloquium: What are Negative Polarity Items?

Negative polarity items (NPIs) are words or, even more often, multiword expressions which require a negative context for their felicitous use. In (1) and (2), we see the NPIs "to give a hoot" and "ever" in two potential licensing contexts ("nobody", "few + N"). We notice that "ever" is acceptable in both, but "to give a hoot" is only acceptable in the former.

1a) Nobody gave a hoot.

  b)*Few athletes gave a hoot.

2a) Nobody ever saw the yeti.

  b) Few people ever saw the yeti.

There have been numerous theories of NPIs ever since Klima (1964) characterized their distributional environment as marked by a syntactic feature that he called "affective". Analyses have been cast in various syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic frameworks, and their combinations. Yet other theories view NPIs as an exotic specimen of collocational signs, lexical or phrasal units which require the presence of a negation-like meaning component, be it semantic or pragmatic.

With a very small number of exceptions, what NPI studies to date have in common is that they are based on a very small set of NPIs, typically those involving the morpheme "any" or its counterparts in other languages. In effect, far-reaching theoretical decisions are made that take their justification from extremely subtle introspective judgments about very few examples of NPIs and NPI licensing environments.

After a quick overview of the theoretical landscape and the known distribution of NPIs, I will report on ongoing work by our research group in Frankfurt to ground NPI research in a better understanding of its empirical base. Topics include challenges of identifying new NPIs, methods of data collection, and the design and implementation of an openly accessible cross-linguistic database. We will see what kind of data is useful in such a collection, how to structure it, and how the emerging collection can be queried.

Our project languages are German, Romanian, and English, but in this presentation, I will focus primarily on German.