Negative polarity items in Ewe

Chris Collins; Paul M. Postal; Elvis Yevudey

doi:10.1017/S002222671700007X

Negative polarity items in Ewe

Chris Collins, Paul M. Postal, Elvis Yevudey

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Collins & Postal (2014) argue that English NPIs have two distinct syntactic structures: A unary NEG structure and a binary NEG structure. They suggest that this distinction is generally valid for natural languages. This formal difference was taken to reconstruct the common distinction in NPI studies between strong and weak NPIs. The present analysis of Ewe NPIs seeks to provide cross-linguistic support for this dual conception of NPIs by showing that the ke-NPIs in this language are all properly analyzed exclusively as unary NEG structures.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	331-365
Number of pages	35
Journal	Journal of Linguistics
Volume	54
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/S002222671700007X
State	Published - Apr 1 2018

Keywords

Bipartite negation
Events
Ewe
NEgative polarity items
Weak and strong NPIs

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics
Philosophy
Linguistics and Language

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10.1017/S002222671700007X

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abstract = "Collins & Postal (2014) argue that English NPIs have two distinct syntactic structures: A unary NEG structure and a binary NEG structure. They suggest that this distinction is generally valid for natural languages. This formal difference was taken to reconstruct the common distinction in NPI studies between strong and weak NPIs. The present analysis of Ewe NPIs seeks to provide cross-linguistic support for this dual conception of NPIs by showing that the ke-NPIs in this language are all properly analyzed exclusively as unary NEG structures.",

keywords = "Bipartite negation, Events, Ewe, NEgative polarity items, Weak and strong NPIs",

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AU - Yevudey, Elvis

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AB - Collins & Postal (2014) argue that English NPIs have two distinct syntactic structures: A unary NEG structure and a binary NEG structure. They suggest that this distinction is generally valid for natural languages. This formal difference was taken to reconstruct the common distinction in NPI studies between strong and weak NPIs. The present analysis of Ewe NPIs seeks to provide cross-linguistic support for this dual conception of NPIs by showing that the ke-NPIs in this language are all properly analyzed exclusively as unary NEG structures.

KW - Bipartite negation

KW - Events

KW - Ewe

KW - NEgative polarity items

KW - Weak and strong NPIs

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ER -

Negative polarity items in Ewe

Abstract

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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