Negative Polarity Items in non-negative contexts Â
The project aims to reconcile conventional assumptions regarding the licensing of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) with observed exceptions, with a focus on English, German, and Romanian. The initial hypothesis posits that weak NPIs necessitate at least a weak licenser in the at-issue meaning, while strong NPIs require a strong licenser, which may appear in either the at-issue or non-at-issue content. The project’s empirical approach will combine quantitative and qualitative data analyses, including acceptability judgments. The ultimate objective is to develop an empirically grounded theory of NPI licensing within a constraint-based grammar framework.Â
More about our project
Individual project page
NPI resource
External co-operation partners:
Gianina Iordăchioaia (Graz)
Monica-Mihaela Rizea (Bucharest)Â
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Publications
2026
Formal semantics: An empirically based approach Book Forthcoming
LangSci Press., Forthcoming.
Semantik und Pragmatik (WSK 10) Book Chapter Forthcoming
In: Gutzmann, D.; Turgay, K.; Zimmermann, T. E. (Ed.): Chapter [Multiple entries], De Gruyter Brill, Forthcoming.
2025
Horn clauses and strict NPIs under negated matrix clauses Conference
2025.
2024
Horn clauses and strict NPIs under negated matrix clauses Journal Article
In: hpsg, 2024, ISSN: 1535-1793.
The landscape of Negative Polarity Items: In search of a distributional correlate to acceptability clusters Diploma Thesis
Goethe University Frankfurt, 2024.
Project Leaders
Apl. Prof. Frank Richter
Dep. of English and American Studies, GU Frankfurt
Prof. Manfred Sailer
Dep. of English and American Studies, GU Frankfurt
Research Areas
Negative polarity items, corpus linguistics, database, non-at-issue semantics, HPSGÂ