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Another Look at NPIs in Definite Descriptions: An Experimental Approach

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Book cover Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

Part of the book series: Language, Cognition, and Mind ((LCAM,volume 1))

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of negative polarity items in the restrictor of definite descriptions. This matter has received little attention in the literature and the discussion of data has been contradictory. The goal of this paper is to review existing approaches to licensing and to offer additional data points to the debate. This paper reports two experiments. The first is a pen and paper judgment survey conducted in a large undergraduate course. The experiment explored subjects’ fine intuitions about NPIs in the restrictors of definite descriptions, as opposed to other environments. The second experiment was conducted online through the Amazon Mechanical Turk website. This experiment simultaneously investigated the influence of grammatical number and genericity/habituality on judgments concerning NPIs in the restrictors of definite descriptions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Jackson (1995) and Gajewski (2011) for ideas about the status of NPIs in the restrictor of most.

  2. 2.

    A reviewer rightly points out that this conclusion may have to be reconsidered if plural definite descriptions carry an ‘excluded middle’ or all-or-nothing presupposition, as proposed for example in Löbner (2000).

  3. 3.

    A reviewer observes that the badness of (18)b, c derives more from the speaker having particular individuals in mind, rather than the existence presupposition itself. The reviewer finds the following conclusion to (18) greatly improved, though it still carries the existence presupposition:

    • (i) B: No doubt the students who had any desire to leave the party left.

  4. 4.

    For our purposes, we will discuss cases in which distribution is down to the atomic parts of an individual. In intermediate distributivity, there may be distribution to sub-pluralities.

  5. 5.

    A reviewer observes that similar problems could arise with more distributive predicates. For example, we can say (i) truthfully even if a small subset of the linguists are not tall. Suppose the subset is the set of semanticists. Then we could not conclude that the semanticists are a tall bunch.

    • (i) The linguists are a tall bunch.

      I leave the effect of definites’ tolerance of exceptions on licensing for further research.

  6. 6.

    A superfund site in the United States is one that has been contaminated by radioactivity. One can easily imagine gravel being used in such a site, contaminated and then removed to another site. This facilitates the use of the NPI adverb ever. A reviewer finds this example ungrammatical.

  7. 7.

    A reviewer wonders why definites are being compared to quantificational determiners, since these are likely of different types. I compare them assuming that they share similar syntactic structures and that it is possible that the definite determiner like the quantifiers may be a licenser. But see Sect. 6 below.

  8. 8.

    It should be noted that sometimes environments that ‘should not’ license NPIs—according to the Fauconnier/Ladusaw Hypothesis—actually do. See von Fintel (1999) for discussion of only and others. The controls in the experiments are rather uncontroversial, however.

  9. 9.

    Ever does, however, have certain very limited and often archaic-sounding uses outside NPI-licensing environments, e.g. it was ever thus, ever so tired, ever the optimist.

  10. 10.

    A reviewer kindly points out that this result converges with corpus studies such as Hoeksema (2012) that show that despite being very frequent, definite determiners are rare licensers of NPIs.

  11. 11.

    Horn (2013) points to the importance of existence inferences in NPI-licensing definites by comparing the to the only:

    • (i) The *(only) man who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man.

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Acknowledgments

This work has benefited greatly from discussion with Elena Guerzoni, Chris Hsieh, Michael Jacques and Yael Sharvit. Michael Jacques also played an instrumental role in assembling and administering Experiment One above. All errors in this work are mine.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, 365 Fairfield Way, Storrs, Mansfield, CT, 06269-1145, USA

    Jon Gajewski

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  1. Jon Gajewski
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Correspondence to Jon Gajewski .

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  1. Département des Sciences du Langage, University of Caen Lower Normandy, Caen, France

    Pierre Larrivée

  2. #308 Bldg 150, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Chungmin Lee

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Gajewski, J. (2016). Another Look at NPIs in Definite Descriptions: An Experimental Approach. In: Larrivée, P., Lee, C. (eds) Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_13

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