Braucht niemanden zu scheren: NPI Licensing in German

NPIs have been studied intensely in several linguistic frameworks since Klima (1964). Since they may occur both in the scope of negation as well as in a variety of other semantically or pragmatically related environments (such as interrogatives, antecedents of conditionals, modifiers of superlative and universal NPs, complements of adversative predicates, to name a few), one very active and controversial research area is the detailed description of possible licensing contexts. One of the first steps towards such an NPI licensing theory was taken by Ladusaw (1980), who established that NPIs can only occur in downward-entailing (DE) contexts, building on an idea from Fauconnier (1975). In the face of a number of open questions concerning the standard Fauconnier-Ladusaw theory of NPIs, there has been further elaboration on this, as well as alternative analyses, some of which will be briefly sketched in Section 2 below. None of the semantic theories of NPIs have as yet been integrated into HPSG. The aim of the present paper is twofold. (1), we will present new representative data from German which highlight the kinds of distributional restrictions NPIs exhibit within the broader range of licensing domains known from the literature and indicated above, and (2), we will propose an architecture for an NPI licensing theory in HPSG.