NPI licensing in Jordanian Arabic: An argument for downward entailment and syntax-semantics interface

NPI Licensing, Strawson Entailment, and Context Dependency

The Fauconnier-Ladusaw analysis of negative polarity licensing (that NPIs are licensed in the scope of downward entailing operators) continues to be the benchmark theory of negative polarity. In this paper, I consider some of the moves that are needed to maintain its basic intuition in some recalcitrant arenas: negative polarity licensing by only, adversatives, superlatives, and conditionals. W...

NPI Licensing , Strawson Entailment , and Context Dependency KAI

The Fauconnier-Ladusaw analysis of negative polarity licensing (that NPIs are licensed in the scope of downward entailing operators) continues to be the benchmark theory of negative polarity. In this paper, I consider some of the moves that are needed to maintain its basic intuition in some recalcitrant arenas: negative polarity licensing by only, adversatives, superlatives, and conditionals. W...

Negative Polarity Licensing at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Recent work on the syntax-semantics interface (see e.g. (Dalrymple et al., 1994)) uses a fragment of linear logic as a 'glue language' for assembling meanings compositionally. This paper presents a glue language account of how negative polarity items (e.g. ever, any) get licensed within the scope of negative or downward-entailing contexts (Ladusaw, 1979), e.g. Nobody ever left. This treatment o...

NPI Licensing in Temporal Clauses

This paper offers a systematic approach to NPI licensing in temporal clauses based on a uniform analysis of temporal connectives as relations between times and relying on appropriate type shifting for compositional buildup. The quantificational force commonly associated with temporal connectives is attributed to the operators earliest and max operating on the temporal clause and effecting the n...

NPI licensing and head movement