NPI Bank

Multilingual collections of negative polarity items

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Purpose and Design of NPI Bank

The NPI Bank offers users an interface to a large collection of NPI data from several languages. It was created by Project B05 of the Sonderforschungsbereich 1629. Broadly speaking, B05 focuses on understanding how negation functions in different linguistic contexts. By investigating Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in non-negative contexts, we aim to contribute significant insights to the broader field of linguistic negation.

The project seeks to reconcile traditional assumptions about the licensing of Negative Polarity Items with observed exceptions, focusing specifically on English, German, and Romanian. We hypothesize that weak NPIs require at least a weak licenser in the at-issue meaning, while strong NPIs demand a strong licenser, which can appear in either the at-issue or non-at-issue content. Our empirical approach integrates both quantitative and qualitative data analyses, including acceptability judgments. Ultimately, the project aims to develop an empirically grounded theory of NPI licensing within a constraint-based grammar framework. The NPI Bank builds on and extends previous work on the Collection of Distributionally Idiosyncratic Items (CoDII).

NPIs

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are expressions that typically occur in sentences containing a negation and are banned from affirmative contexts. A simple example is the English adverb 'ever'. The word 'ever' can be used in an utterance with sentential negation, such as 'She didn't ever go to school,' but when used without (some kind of) negation in its context, it results in a sentence that is not accepted as well-formed by English speakers, such as 'She ever went to school.'

Licensers

In the theory of Negative Polarity Items, licensers are linguistic elements whose presence is required by an NPI. Research into NPIs has uncovered different classes of licensers, which are distinguished by their negation strength. For example, the determiner 'no' as in 'no book' carries a stronger negative meaning than the determiner 'few' as in 'few books'. Moreover, different NPIs may require that their licensers exhibit at least a certain negation strength. Licensers may appear as single words, multi-word expressions, or even as structural or pragmatic properties in the context of an NPI.

Examples

NPIs and their licensers are fundamental constituents of a theory of expressions whose occurrence is restricted to semantically negative environments. The NPI bank collects and presents real world data that documents the use of NPIs in their licensing environments.

Bibliography

The bibliography collects scientific publications that are primarily concerned with Polarity Items. At the moment, the bibliography is clearly biased towards publications on German, English and Dutch. We would be very grateful for references to literature on other languages. The bibliography continues the work begun in the context of creating CoDII.