On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord

Elena Herburger
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Abstract

This 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.
关于 NPI 和负协和的历史
本文旨在更好地理解负极性项目(NPI)是如何产生的,以及它们是如何随着时间的推移而变化的。文章认为,如果一个表达式的语义使其在消极或向下引申的语境中具有实用性,那么它就可能成为一个 NPI,这通常是因为其意义导致了实用性的增强,但有时也是因为其语义导致了实用性的减弱。本文特别关注历史上可能出现的涉及语用强度的两种模式:负协和(Negative Concord,NC)和我所说的 NPI 二元化(NPI Dualization)。我认为,这两种模式都涉及到具有类存在语义或低标度语义的 NPI 与同音但语义不同、分布更自由的表达之间的配对;在 Negative Concord 中,同音词在语义上是否定的,而在 NPI Dualization 中,同音词在语义上是普遍的。文章认为,语用强度在 NPI 的起源和 NPI 二元化的历史中发挥着重要作用,但与它们的同步许可并不直接相关。相反,文章主张回到这样一种观点,即 NPI 在词法上是以语义上无意义的分布特征为标志的,需要在句法上加以重视。在概念层面上,文章认为历史转变可能是可能性问题。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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