Time matters: The role of temporal boundaries in NPI licensing

Julie Goncharov, Lavi Wolf

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

This paper discusses double Negative Polarity Item (NPI) constructions, such as*I don't think at all John will leave until 10pm. These constructions have been claimed to provide a strong argument for a syntactic approach to Neg-raising (NR) (Lakoff, 1969; Prince, 1976; Crowley, 2019). We show that the empirical landscape is more intricate than what has been reported in the literature. As a result, far from supporting the syntactic approach to NR (Fillmore, 1963; Collins and Postal, 2014, a.o.), double NPI constructions provide strong evidence against it and in favour of a semantic/pragmatic approach (Bartsch, 1973; Gajewski, 2005; Romoli, 2012, a.o.). We propose an account for a subset of double NPI constructions capitalizing on three ideas: (i) punctual until has a non-cancellable (modal) inference that the action occurs after the time specified by until (Karttunen, 1974; Condo-ravdi, 2008; Iatridou and Zeijlstra, to appear), (ii) epistemic accessibility relations include a time index as well as a world one, and (iii) NPI-like predicate modifiers, such as at all, can be re-conceptualized from a domain-widener to an inhibitor of a contextual domain restriction.

Original languageEnglish
Pages132-141
Number of pages10
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2019
Event22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, AC 2019 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: 18 Dec 201920 Dec 2019

Conference

Conference22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, AC 2019
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period18/12/1920/12/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Software

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