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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on August 25, 2008
Journal of Semantics 2008 25(4):411-450; doi:10.1093/jos/ffn008
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

The Effect of Negative Polarity Items on Inference Verification

Anna Szabolcsi

New York University

Lewis Bott

Cardiff University

Brian McElree

New York University

Correspondence: ANNA SZABOLCSI, Department of Linguistics, New York University, 726 Broadway, New York NY 10003, USA, e-mail: anna.szabolcsi{at}nyu.edu


  Abstract

The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g. Kadmon & Landman 1993; Krifka 1995; Lahiri 1997; Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPIs facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences from sets to subsets were valid. Crucially, we manipulated whether the premises contained an NPI. In Experiment 1, participants completed a metalinguistic reasoning task and Experiments 2 and 3 tested reading times using a self-paced reading task. Contrary to expectations, no facilitation was observed when the NPI was present in the premise compared to when it was absent. In fact, the NPI significantly slowed down reading times in the inference region. Our results therefore favour those scalar theories that predict that the NPI is costly to process (Chierchia 2006), or other, non-scalar theories (Ladusaw 1992; Giannakidou 1998; Szabolcsi 2004; Postal 2005) that likewise predict NPI processing cost but, unlike Chierchia (2006), expect the magnitude of the processing cost to vary with the actual pragmatics of the NPI.

Received for publication 17 December 2007. Revision received 23 June 2008. Accepted for publication 8 July 2008.


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