Jon Gajewski
Licensing Strong NPIs.
There are two kinds of NPIs in English, commonly referred to as weak and strong. Weak NPIs, such as any and ever, are licensed in a proper superset of the expressions that license strong NPIs, such as in weeks and punctual until. Two dimensions are commonly identified along which licensers of these NPIs differ: (i) Negative strength (Zwarts 1998) weak NPIs are licensed by merely Downward Entailing operators, while strong NPIs require Anti-Additive licensers. (ii) Positivity (Atlas 1996) weak NPIs are licensed by some operators that have a "positive" component to their meanings, such as only and sorry; strong NPIs are not. These two dimensions are generally dealt with separately in theories of NPI licensing. This makes weak NPIs differ from strong NPIs in two different ways. The goal of this paper is to account for this binary distinction along a single dimension. Essentially, I attempt to reduce the negative strength dimension to the positivity dimension by noting that weaker negative operators typically give rise to positive implicatures, which I propose interfere with the licensing of strong NPIs.
Last Modified: January 29, 2007