Archive

Speaker: Giorgio Sbardolini
Title: Negative Polarity Items are not harmonious
Date:
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Location: SP107 F1.15 (ILLC Seminar Room)

Abstract

I'll present the idea I'm working on regarding so-called weak NPIs: items such as English any(thing/one/body) and ever. My claim is that their distribution can be accounted for if we assume that they have a universal semantics but they are non-harmonious: they violate constraints on logical "well-formedness" analogous to Arthur Prior's famous tonk connective.