NPI Licensing Contexts in German and English: An Analysis of a Peculiar Construction

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2009
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
The licensing conditions governing Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are extremely idiosyncratic, causing problems for linguistics who wish to describe them in terms of classes or hierarchies. Furthermore, since many NPI licensing contexts involve no overt negation, it is difficult to define what characterizes a “negative sense.” With examples from English and German, this paper examines the behavior of both Negative Polarity Items and Positive Polarity Items (PPIs) and reviews several attempts toward their organization. This paper pays special attention to a particular construction in German, einen Dreck + V, whose behavior is characteristic of an NPI but whose inability to appear in the scope of a negative operator challenges this label. With the help of more elaborated definitions of NPI classes and parallel examples from English, this paper concludes that while the characterization of einen Dreck + V as an NPI that elicits its own negation is not an unreasonable conclusion, there exists compelling evidence that it belongs to a different class of phrases, or ZERO operators.
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