Lexical variation in NPI illusions – A case study of German jemals 'ever' and so recht 'really'

Abstract

The illusory licensing of negative polarity items has been an insightful phenomenon for accounts of human sentence processing, as its extreme selectivity has proven problematic to explain in terms of parsing principles that underlie the establishment of other item-to-item dependencies. Using speeded acceptability judgments, I provide novel experimental evidence that the NPI illusion may be restricted to a particular type of NPI—illusory licensing was replicated for German jemals 'ever', but was not confirmed for the attenuating NPI so recht 'really'. I argue that this finding challenges all current accounts of the NPI illusion, and propose an explanation that purports an interaction between a scalar NPI licensing mechanism and scalar properties of the illusory licensing context as the source of the NPI illusion.