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On the non-licensing of NPIs in the only-focus
Conference paper   Peer reviewed

On the non-licensing of NPIs in the only-focus

I.-Ta Chris Hsieh
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol.7218 LNCS, pp.361-370
2012
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_37

Abstract

innocent exclusion negative polarity item NPI licensing only Theoretical Computer Science Computer Science (all)
This paper focuses on the ungrammaticality of NPIs in the focus associated with only. I first show that a naïve combination of the Strawson Downward Entailing (SDE) condition of NPI licensing (von Fintel 1999) and a Horn-style semantics of only (Horn 1969; a.o.) fails to predict that NPIs are ungrammatical in the focus associatedonly. To solve this problem, I suggest an analysis that appeals to a semantics of only implemented with the notion of innocent exclusion (Fox 2007) and a revision of the SDE condition that refers to assignment functions. The proposed analysis suggests that NPI licensing should be independent of the information provided by the discourse context. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

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