TY - JOUR
T1 - The effect of negative polarity items on inference verification
AU - Szabolcsi, Anna
AU - Bott, Lewis
AU - McElree, Brian
N1 - Funding Information:
Lewis Bott was supported by NIMH Grant MH41704 awarded to Gregory L. Murphy for part of this work. Further support was provided by NIH grant R01HD056200 awarded to Brian McElree. We are grateful to Lyn Frazier, Emmanuel Chemla and Mark Steedman for helpful discussion of an earlier version of the manuscript, to the editor and two reviewers for comments, and to Gregory L. Murphy for his advice and the use of his laboratory. We also thank Jessica Piercy for collecting the data and Tuuli Adams and Peter Liem for help with writing the items.
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1093/jos/ffn008
DO - 10.1093/jos/ffn008
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:65549128254
SN - 0167-5133
VL - 25
SP - 411
EP - 450
JO - Journal of Semantics
JF - Journal of Semantics
IS - 4
ER -