Who Can See the Forest for the Trees? Extracting Multiword Negative Polarity Items from Dependency-Parsed Text

Ever since the groundbreaking work by Fauconnier (1975) and Ladusaw (1980), research on negative polarity items (npis) has been dominated by two fundamental assumptions about the licensing contexts of npis and their inherent semantic-pragmatic properties. The contexts in which npis may occur felicitously are said to have the semantic property of being downward entailing (which we will briefly explain below), and the elements themselves are often said to be located at the end of a pragmatically motivated scale, typically signalling a minimal amount, a smallest size, or similar concept. While the Ladusaw-Fauconnier theory has been substantially refined over time, and while there are very diverse variations on how the technical details of the theory are spelled out, its core insights are currently widely accepted and remain a point of reference for practically any ‘formal’ theory of npis. Some theories are syntactic in nature and formulate the relevant scope constraints relative to (possibly quite abstract) syntactic configurations, others are semantic and define hierarchies of negations of varying strength, and yet another group of theories is predominantly pragmatic, relying heavily on scalar implicatures, domain widening, and related concepts. There are, of course, also approaches in which syntax, semantics, and pragmatics all play a role. Overall, the number of papers and books that have been published on the subject of npis over the last 40 years is nothing short of intimidating.1 Given the sheer volume of the npi literature, it is all the more surprising and striking that much of the discussion revolves around a very small set of items. Especially some of the most sophisticated and influential papers, such as Kadmon and Landman (1993), Krifka (1995), and Chierchia (2006), discuss hardly more than a handful of items, and some studies almost exclusively focus on one, viz. English any, which can be regarded as the classical example for a minimizer, with its variants anything, anyone, anybody, anywhere, etc. Since with any one of the most prominent items of interest is a minimizer, investigations into the significance of this particular property for the entire class of npis have turned into a dominating topic and occasionally even push aside the observation that being a minimizer is not a necessary (nor a sufficient) property of npis. As a result of its narrow empirical focus, the tendency to build a very comprehensive theory on an extremely small, carefully chosen but deeply researched set of examples is characteristic for large parts of the literature on npis. This might mean that only a fraction of the properties and behavior of npis are treated in current theories.