LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Polarity Item, Logical Consequence
Document Summary
Hypothesis 1: if a negative polarity item (npi) appears in a sentence, this sentence must also contain a negative element. Bad: *charlie will believe at all that lucy will not like snoopy, *charlie will believe at all that nobody will like snoopy. Hypothesis 2: if a negative polarity item (npi) appears in a sentence, this sentence must also contain a negative element that must come first, before the npi. Hypothesis 1 is correct if hypothesis 2 is correct. But is hypothesis 2 says more about english. Linguistic rules depend on structure and not preceding/before/after. Bad: *people who do not think like snoopy at all. Hypothesis 3: a sentence containing a npi is grammatical only if the npi is inside the negative element"s sister. Good: *people who do not think like snoopy at all. Bad: less than 5 students like snoopy at all, every student who like snoopy at all will enjoy this example.
