Petr Rossyaykin (Lomonosov Moscow State University) Indefinites, scalar particles, and question semantics

According to a barely controversial generalization, the licensing of (at least some) negative polarity items (NPIs) is dependent on a particular entailment pattern between the assertion and its alternatives, viz. (entailment) scale reversal or downward entailingness (Fauconnier 1975, 1978; Ladusaw 1979; et seq.). Questions are one of the environments in which NPIs are licensed (e.g. Did you eat anything?), yet there is no obvious entailment relation between questions. This raises the puzzle of why NPIs are acceptable in questions. In this talk I will present and discuss a cross-linguistic dataset concerning the distribution of scalar particles (like English even), showing that indefinite NPIs and NPIs with scalar particles behave differently w.r.t. their acceptability in (polar) questions. In particular, PQs are not a scale reversal environment for scalar particles (contra some earlier proposals). I will discuss the consequences of this observation for the theory of NPI licensing.