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Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing pp 127–145Cite as

Negative Polarity Items as Collocations: Experimental Evidence from German

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Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 48))

Abstract

We present experimental findings that support the hypothesis that the licensing requirements of negative polarity items (NPIs) pattern with well-formedness conditions on frozen syntactic-semantic features of idiomatic expressions. When multiword NPIs that require a strong negation as their licenser are accompanied by a weaker type of negative licenser instead, they are perceived as degraded by native speakers the same way as violations of morphosyntactic co-occurrence requirements in the idiomatic multiword component of these NPIs. Such a violation occurs for example when a certain noun phrase in argument position is in plural form instead of singular, or when an obligatory lexical element is replaced by a synonym. Subsuming idiomatic phrases under the more general category of (not necessarily idiomatic) collocationally restricted complex expressions, we take our results as evidence for a theory of NPIs which interprets their licensing in syntactically delimited negative environments as an instance of satisfying the well-formedness constraints of a collocation that comprises a semantic restriction. The lexically variable negation component of NPIs is interpreted as an abstract semantic co-occurrence requirement of a complex collocation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Zwarts (1997) distinguishes more licensing environments, and subsequent semantic theories consider even more licensing contexts with other properties, such as non-veridicality. We will not need these refinements in our discussion.

  2. 2.

    Assuming that licensing under negation is a defining property of any NPI, negation is not a differentiating context.

  3. 3.

    Further elaborated in comparison to similar attempts in Construction Grammar in Richter and Sailer (2014).

  4. 4.

    www.let.rug.nl/~hoeksema/lexicon_bestanden/v3_document.htm (last accessed April 29th, 2018)

  5. 5.

    URL: www.english-linguistics.de/codii (last accessed April 29th, 2018)

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Acknowledgements

We are greatly indebted to Lyn Frazier for starting us off towards the research part of which is reported here. Even though we haven’t had the opportunity to discuss this work with her, we hope that her influence can be felt in the paper. Thanks to Chuck Clifton and an anonymous reviewer for suggesting improvements on our first draft. Part of the research presented in this paper was supported by the DFG in the Sonderforschungsbereich 441. For help with preparing materials for the experiment, we wish to thank Manfred Sailer and Jan-Philipp Söhn.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Goethe Universität Frankfurt a.M., Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60629, Abteilung Linguistik, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Frank Richter

  2. Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Linguistik/Anglistik, Keplerstraße 17, 70174, Stuttgart, Germany

    Janina Radó

Authors
  1. Frank Richter
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  2. Janina Radó
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Frank Richter .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Morehead State University, Morehead, KY, USA

    Katy Carlson

  2. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Charles Clifton, Jr.

  3. Linguistics Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA

    Janet Dean Fodor

Appendix: Item List

Appendix: Item List

The experimental items are multiword expressions with negative polarity that require an anti-additive licenser in their licensing environment. Licensers are printed in bold face, the words constituting the NPIs (without their licensers) are printed in italics. Modifications to frozen formal properties of the multiword expressions are underlined.

Condition (a) fails to provide an anti-additive licenser and contains a merely downward-entailing licenser instead. Condition (b) meets all well-formedness criteria, with respect to NPI licensing and with respect to frozen formal properties of the multiword expression. Condition (c) violates formal constraints of the multiword expression.

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Richter, F., Radó, J. (2019). Negative Polarity Items as Collocations: Experimental Evidence from German. In: Carlson, K., Clifton, Jr., C., Fodor, J. (eds) Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_7

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