NEG-raising and long-distance licensing of negative polarity items

Abstract

Collins and Postal (2014) have thrown new light on the relation between negation and complementation in contexts that either do or do not permit NEG-raising; in particular, that there are two types of polarity items differing in whether they require NEG-raising for long-distance licensing by negation. Strict items (such as English all that and various other NPIs) require clause-mate licensers, which may undergo NEG-raising to a higher clause (by means of a syntactic transformation) whereas non-strict items (such as any) may also be licensed by negation originating in a higher clause. In this chapter I review the evidence for such a distinction, arguing against a syntactic solution in terms of Neg-Raising, and proposing that the matrix predicate type is relevant for licensing embedded polarity items not only in cases of Neg-Raising, but also in questions. Using a corpus of polarity items in English and Dutch, I discuss various complications that arise in long-distance licensing, including interaction with modals and idiomatic readings of embedding predicates.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 54 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.