Intervention effects in NPI licensing: A quantitative assessment of the scalar implicature explanation. Issue 1 (20th April 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Denić, Milica; Chemla, Emmanuel; Tieu, Lyn
• Is Part Of: Glossa. Volume 3:Issue 1(2018)
• Publication Date: 2018-04-20
• Subjects: intervention effects -- negative polarity items -- scalar implicature -- experimental semantics; Linguistics -- Periodicals; Language and languages -- Periodicals; 410.5
• DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.388
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2397-1835

Abstract

Abstract : This paper reports on five experiments investigating intervention effects in negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. Such intervention effects involve the unexpected ungrammaticality of sentences that contain an intervener, such as a universal quantifier, in between the NPI and its licensor. For example, the licensing of the NPI any in the sentence * Monkey didn't give every lion any chocolate is disrupted by intervention. Interveners also happen to be items that trigger scalar implicatures in environments in which NPIs are licensed (Chierchia 2004 ; 2013 ). A natural hypothesis, initially proposed in Chierchia (2004 ), is that there is a link between the two phenomena. In this paper, we investigate whether intervention effects arise when scalar implicatures are derived.