The traditional approach towards (negative) polarity items is to answer the question in which
contexts NPIs are licensed. The inspiring approaches of Kadmon & Landman (1990,
1993)(K&L) and Krifka (1990, 1992, 1995) go a major step further: they also seek to answer …

196 Manfred Krifka any widening is intended, and that B's second answer requires stress on
ANY. A second problem is that NPls based on any can be used in contexts where the notion
of reduced tolerance to exceptions is at least problematic. For example, we can say …

A standard procedure in the development of multi-item measurement scales is to incorporate
reversed-polarity items to control for and/or identify acquiescence response bias. In spite of
the broad acceptance of this approach, very little work has been done to evaluate the impact …

In this chapter, I will sketch a theory of polarity items which should overcome the problems
mentioned in the last section. It is by and large in the semantic tradition, but adopts certain
ideas of the syntactic tradition as well, and is embedded in a pragmatic theory of …

All of these approaches have made the acceptability of a sentence which contains one of
these so-called negative-polarity items conditional on the presence of a licensing negative
element elsewhere in the sentence. Klima showed that the range of such licensing lexical …

The purpose of this thesis is to show that despite their superficial differences, languages are
the same at a deeper level. The languages we deal with in the thesis are Korean, Japanese,
and English, but the conclusions we draw from them are not limited to them. For this …

Pesetsky's (1987)“aggressively non-D-linked” wh-phrases (like who the hell; hereinafter, wh-
the-hell phrases) exhibit a variety of syntactic and semantic peculiarities, including the fact
that they cannot occur in situ and do not support nonecho readings when occurring in root …

This paper examines different readings of Wh-words (ie question-words) in Mandarin
Chinese. Following Heim's (1982) proposal on indefinites and Nishigauchi's (1986, 1990)
work on wh-words in Japanese, it is proposed that whwords in Mandarin are indefinite NPs …

This work analyzes the level at which Negative Polarity Item Licensing takes place on the
basis of a cross-linguistic study of the licensing conditions imposed on Negative Polarity
Items (NPIs) in structures where negation (Neg) is the polarity licenser. It is argued that the …

This paper addresses a number of issues surrounding the triggering of negative polarity
items, in particular matters of scope and c-command. It is argued that triggering is sensitive
to the scope of negation and negative operators, but that a syntactic treatment in terms of c …