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Introduction

Polarity phenomena in natural language are pervasive and diverse. Polarity items (PIs) are expressions of various syntactic categories, such as nominals, adverbials, verbs, particles, and idioms, with limited distribution: that is, they do not occur in a positive sentence in the simple past. The English word “any,” superlatives like “the faintest sound,” and minimizers such as “lift a finger” are among the first studied PIs. Because of their apparent sensitivity to the presence of negation, they were labeled negative PIs (NPIs). English NPIs are also contrasted with positive polarity items (PPIs) in the earlier literature, words such as “some” and “already,” which are claimed to avoid the negative context. Negative concord words (Overview Papers on N-words) in various languages are treated as NPIs, since these too need negation for well formedness. Typically, “any” and more idiomatic NPIs are viewed as scalar items, rhetorical devices for the manipulation or strengthening of discourse information. PPIs, on the other hand, are argued to be nonscalar. Other NPIs are narrow-scope, nonspecific indefinites that cannot be linked to discourse referents in the way “regular” indefinites are. Such NPIs cross-linguistically do not exhibit the rhetorical effects (emphasis, focus) observed with “any” and minimizers and are typically nonemphatic. The subjunctive mood is often treated as a temporal NPI of this kind. Free choice items (FCIs) are sensitive to the modal, generic, or quantificational properties of the context and seem to disfavor negation. “Any” has both NPI and FCI usages, but it is fairly common in languages to tease the two paradigms apart morphologically. For example, FCIs are usually wh-based (see, e.g., English “whoever”) and contain special morphology (unlike “any”). NPIs and FCIs are sensitive to the logical properties of the sentences in which they occur and are subject to licensing. Licensing typically postulates that the PI be in the syntactic or semantic scope of the licensor—and this captures the narrow scope property of most PI classes. What logical property unifies licensors as a natural class has been a matter of intense debate, with proposals including negation, Licensing and Downward Entailment, and Negative Polarity Items and Nonveridicality. Empirically, nonveridicality captures best the wide range of polarity environments and offers a flexible framework to capture the variation across NPI and FCI classes in a number of languages, predicting possible (but not identical) distributions in negative, downward entailing, and nondownward entailing nonveridical contexts, such as modal contexts, questions, generic sentences, and disjunctions. William Ladusaw views NPI licensing as a global constraint on grammatical representations, but nowadays the limited distribution and the ensuing need for licensing are explained by appealing to the lexical semantic or pragmatic properties of individual PI classes (e.g., scalarity, referential deficiency, or a free choice component), which result in most cases in nonfully identical yet predictable distributions. These major considerations and a solid cross-linguistic perspective will guide the presentation of the material in this article.

Overview Articles in Handbooks

These are overview articles on negative polarity that appeared between 1996 and 2011. The study of polarity emerged as a relatively new paradigm in the 1970s, and only in the late 1980s and 1990s did a substantial body of data (including cross-linguistic studies) become publicly available. This list is almost exhaustive. Historically the first, Ladusaw 1996 delineates three major questions that have subsequently guided the field: the licensing question, the sensitivity question, and the status question. Israel 2004 offers a pragmatic theory of negative polarity item (NPI) licensing in English, distinguishing between emphatic and attenuating NPIs and positive polarity items (PPIs). Anastasia Giannakidou’s perspective is more cross-linguistic and brings together scalar as well as referentially deficient NPIs. Giannakidou also offers criticism of the no-variation scalar approach (Giannakidou 2011). Penka and Zeijlstra 2010 incorporates this perspective and emphasizes more syntactic aspects of licensing.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2011. Negative and positive polarity items: Variation, licensing, and compositionality. In Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning. Edited by Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner, 1660–1712. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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This is a broad overview of various polarity phenomena within a cross-linguistic perspective and with emphasis on variation. English and Greek are the primary languages. It describes the major typological varieties of NPIs (scalar NPIs versus referentially deficient NPIs, strong NPIs, and broad NPIs). It also contains new discussion on recent theories of positive polarity items.
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Israel, Michael. 2004. The pragmatics of polarity. In The handbook of pragmatics. Edited by Laurence R. Horn and Gregory L. Ward, 701–723. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Israel presents his pragmatic theory of NPIs, the “scalar model for polarity,” as he calls it. NPIs in this theory are rhetorical devices that interact with the logical properties of the context. The discussion relies on his fundamental distinction between emphatic and attenuating NPIs and PPIs.
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Ladusaw, William. 1996. Negation and polarity items. In The handbook of contemporary semantic theory. Edited by Shalom Lappin, 321–341. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Ladusaw sets the stage with three major questions in regard to polarity: the licensing question, the sensitivity question, and the status question. He mainly discusses English polarity items.
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Penka, Doris, and Hedde Zeijlstra. 2010. Negation and polarity: An introduction. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28:771–786.
DOI: 10.1007/s11049-010-9114-0 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a brief overview with emphasis on syntactic questions and a broad empirical perspective.
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Collections and Edited Volumes

This section lists major collections on polarity phenomena. The volumes and many of the articles in them have been widely cited in the past twenty years, and the volumes were produced typically after workshops on polarity or negation held in the years preceding. Hoeksema 1995 is historically the first collection and contains some very influential semantics and pragmatics articles, such as Krifka 1995 (cited under More Recent Strengthening Approaches to “Any”) and Zwarts 1995 (cited under Negative Polarity Items and Nonveridicality). Horn and Kato 2000 contains works on Japanese and studies with more historical emphasis and a paper by Laurence R. Horn on free choice items. Forget, et al. 1997 is more negation-oriented and contains interesting discussions of negative concord in a number of languages, including Haitian Creole, Greek, and Catalan. Hoeksema, et al. 2001 contains studies of, besides English, Dutch and Greek negative polarity items (NPIs). Andronis, et al. 2002 contains papers that address syntactic and semantic as well as pragmatic aspects of various polarity phenomena. Penka and Zeijlstra 2010 contains new research and historical and corpus approaches to NPIs.

Andronis, Mary, A. Pycha, and K. Yoshimura, eds. 2002. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Parasession on polarity items. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
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This is a collection of papers that address syntactic and semantic as well as pragmatic aspects of various polarity phenomena in a wide range of languages.
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Forget, Daniel, Paul Hirschbühler, France Martineau, and María Luisa Rivero, eds. 1997. Negation and polarity: Syntax and semantics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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This volume emerged from the Workshop on Polarity and Negation at the University of Ottawa and captures the main emphasis of the research in the early to mid-1990s: negative concord and more syntactic questions about licensing.
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Hoeksema, Jack, ed. 1995. Special Issue on negative polarity. Linguistic Analysis 25.3–4.
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Contains some frequently cited papers, such as Krifka 1995 (cited under More Recent Strengthening Approaches to “Any”) and Zwarts 1995 (cited under Negative Polarity Items and Nonveridicality).
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Hoeksema, Jacob, Hotze Rullmann, Victor Sánchez-Valencia, and Ton van der Wouden, eds. 2001. Perspectives on negation and polarity items. Papers presented at a conference held at the University of Gronigen, 1986. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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This volume comprises papers from the Groningen Workshop on Polarity that was held at the University of Groningen in 1996 and contains syntax-semantics, pragmatics, and corpus studies of NPIs. Corpus studies started emerging around that time, mostly due to Hoeksema’s work on Dutch NPIs.
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Horn, Laurence R., ed. 2010. The expression of negation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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This combines theoretical with typological approaches along with data from corpus linguistics. Horn offers an updated and quite comprehensive bibliography, pp. 283–332.
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Horn, Laurence R., and Yasuhiko Kato, eds. 2000. Negation and polarity: Syntactic and semantic perspectives. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A collection of articles with emphasis on English and Japanese, including historical data.
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Penka, Doris, and Hedde Zeijlstra, eds. 2010. Special Issue: Negation and polarity items. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28.4.
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This collection is in a thesis-response format and contains research in syntax, semantics, and historical developments of NPIs.
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Phd Dissertations

Most of the breakthroughs in polarity research have come in PhD dissertations (e.g., Ladusaw 1980, Linebarger 1980, Giannakidou 1997). The most important dissertations on negative polarity items (NPIs) are categorized by language; the languages are given in alphabetical order. Also included are dissertations whose main focus is free choice items and dissertations that address questions of negation and negative concord.

English Negative Polarity Items

Ladusaw 1980 and Linebarger 1980 are landmark dissertations for the study of English NPIs. They present two opposing views on the answer to the licensing question. William Ladusaw argues that the logical-semantic property of downward entailment is responsible for licensing English NPIs, but Marcia Linebarger claims that it is negation, either logically (when present in the sentence) or via generalized conversational implicature. This tension is still not settled vis-à-vis “any.” Other important works in this section are Jackson 1995, Israel 1998, Tovena 1995, and Uribe-Etxebarria 1994.

Israel, Michael. 1998. The rhetoric of grammar: Scalar reasoning and polarity sensitivity. PhD diss., Univ. of California, San Diego.
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Israel lays out the foundations for his rhetorical theory of emphatic and attenuating NPIs and positive polarity items (PPIs).
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Jackson, Eric. 1995. Weak and strong negative polarity items: Licensing and intervention. PhD diss., Stanford Univ.
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This dissertation discusses intervention phenomena such as John didn’t give a red cent to every charity. This is the first detailed study of these phenomena after Linebarger 1987 (cited under Syntactic Conditions on Negative Polarity Item Licensing, Intervention Phenomena, Parasitic Licensing), which initiated the discussion.
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Ladusaw, William. 1980. Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations. New York: Garland.
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In this published dissertation, Ladusaw proposes the downward entailment (DE) theory for “any” and a research paradigm that would be very influential. Ladusaw also acknowledges empirical shortcomings of DE, for example, the appearance of NPIs in questions or with factive verbs, “only,” and “hardly” is problematic. Free choice (FC) occurrences of “any” with modals and imperatives do not follow from the DE generalization either and are put aside as distinct from NPI “any.”
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Linebarger, Marcia. 1980. The grammar of negative polarity. PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Linebarger criticizes Ladusaw’s approach and introduces many problematic counterexamples. Given the vast number of non-DE instances where “any” occurs, Linebarger is highly skeptical that NPIs are licensed purely by entailment patterns of the sentence. She proposes that negation is the main licensing force, which is argued to license via entailment or generalized conversational implicature.
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Tovena, Lucia. 1995. The fine structure of polarity items. PhD diss., Univ. of Edinburgh.
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Tovena’s dissertation is among the first works to discuss the sensitivity question for NPIs, and she discusses “any” as well as “yet/still” and Italian ancora.
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Uribe-Etxebarria, Miriam. 1994. Interface licensing conditions on negative polarity licensing: A theory of polarity and tense interactions. PhD diss., Univ. of Connecticut.
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This dissertation addresses the scope conditions on NPIs and argues that the apparent surface c-command constraint (Any student didn’t come) must be stated as an LF constraint. The thesis also contains data from Basque NPI licensing and negative concord.
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Chinese Negative Polarity Items

Lin 1996 shows that Chinese bare wh-words, which function as NPIs, do not appear simply in negative or downward entailing contexts but in contexts that suspend existence. This generalization is very close in spirit to Anastasia Giannakidou’s observation that Greek NPIs appear in nonveridical contexts (Giannakidou 1997, cited under Greek Negative Polarity Items). This is important to emphasize because these are two independent studies of typologically unrelated languages that came to similar conclusions.

Lin, Jo-Wang. 1996. Polarity licensing and wh-phrase quantification in Chinese. PhD diss., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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Lin studies Mandarin NPIs that are based on wh-forms and proposes that Chinese NPIs are licensed not in DE contexts but in contexts that imply nonexistence. This proposal bears a strong connection to Anastasia Giannakidou and Frans Zwarts’s nonveridicality theory.
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Dutch Negative Polarity Items

Important dissertations on Dutch NPIs are Zwarts 1986, which is the first comprehensive study of Dutch NPIs and is written in Dutch; van der Wouden 1997, which applies Frans Zwarts’s algebraic categories to a large range of Dutch data; van der Wal 1996, which studies the acquisition of Dutch NPIs; and Klein 1997. All of these dissertations were produced at the University of Groningen, which was a center for the study of polarity in the Netherlands during the 1990s. Giannakidou 1997 (cited under Greek Negative Polarity Items), a dissertation on Greek NPIs, belongs to that context too.

Klein, Henny. 1997. Adverbs of degree in Dutch. PhD diss., Univ. of Groningen.
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This work discusses the polarity properties of degree adverbials in Dutch.
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van der Wal, Sjoukje. 1996. Negative polarity items and negation: Tandem acquisition. PhD diss., Univ. of Groningen.
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This is a detailed study of first-language (L1) acquisition of Dutch NPIs. A number of NPIs are studied, and the main finding, as the title suggests, is that the acquisition proceeds in parallel with the acquisition of negation.
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van der Wouden, Ton. 1997. Negative contexts: Collocation, polarity, and multiple negation. London: Routledge.
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This is a detailed study of Dutch NPIs following the DE hierarchy of Zwarts 1986 and Zwarts 1998 (cited under Licensing and Downward Entailment). Van der Wouden distinguishes among weak, strong, and superstrong NPIs, ranging from the broadest possible to the narrowest possible distribution. He also discusses more idiomatic NPIs with collocational flavor. Originally presented in 1994 as a PhD dissertation at the University of Groningen.
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Zwarts, Frans. 1986. Categoriale grammatica en algebraïsche semantiek. Een onderzoek naar negatie en polariteit in het Nederlands. PhD diss., Univ. of Groningen.
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Zwarts outlines an algebraic semantics to distinguish three kinds of DE functions: simple DE, antiadditive, and antimorphic functions (sentential negation). In Zwarts’s view (further developed in Zwarts 1998, cited under Licensing and Downward Entailment), these all express different strengths of negation: DE expresses minimal negation, whereas antiadditive and antimorphic functions are stronger negations. The three differ of course in licensing force.
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Greek Negative Polarity Items

There are two major works on Greek NPIs fifteen years apart. Veloudis 1982 offers a broad description of negative particles, neg-raising, and other negation-related phenomena in Greek and observes the core distinction between emphatic and nonemphatic “negative” pronouns, which Giannakidou 1997 reformulates as emphatic and nonemphatic NPIs. Giannakidou uses the Greek data to argue for the nonveridicality theory of polarity, one of the major theoretical approaches in the late 20th century and an extension of the DE-based logical approach. The Greek data along with the Chinese, presented in Lin 1996 (cited under Chinese Negative Polarity Items), were important in breaking from the English-based tradition because they showed (a) NPI paradigms that are not scalar and (b) distribution extending beyond negation and DE to modalities, the future, questions, and even disjunction.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1997. The landscape of polarity items. PhD diss., Univ. of Groningen.
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This is a detailed study of four polarity items (PIs) in Greek (strong emphatic NPIs, weak nonemphatic NPIs, free choice items [FCIs], and subjunctive relative clauses) and historically the first attempt to include free choice phenomena into the domain of polarity. This work and Zwarts 1995 (cited under Negative Polarity Items and Nonveridicality) are the initiators of the nonveridicality theory of polarity, which is proposed as a conservative extension of DE.
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Veloudis, Yannis. 1982. Negation in Greek. PhD diss., Univ. of Reading.
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This is a very detailed description of negation and negative sentences in Greek, including discussion of neg-raising and negative words. It establishes the basic distinction between emphatic and nonemphatic NPIs in Greek.
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Italian Negative Polarity Items

Bernardi 2002 is a systematic study of Italian weak and strong NPIs and FCIs within the nonveridicality framework and in categorial type logic.

Bernardi, Raffaella. 2002. Reasoning with polarity in categorial type logic. PhD diss., Univ. of Utrecht.
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Bernardi discusses weak and strong NPIs in Italian as well as FCIs. The framework is categorial type logic, which studies the interface of natural language syntax and semantics. A logical theory of licensing and antilicensing relations is proposed, relying on the nonveridicality theory, which crosscuts the form and meaning dimensions.
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Romanian Negative Polarity Items

An important contribution is Falaus 2009. Anamaria Falaus proposes an epistemic constraint on the Romanian NPI vreun, which is very similar to nonveridicality, as it requires that vreun appear in a sentence that “entails that the epistemic agent’s doxastic alternatives include non p-worlds.”

Falaus, Anamaria. 2009. Polarity items and dependent indefinites in Romanian. PhD diss., Univ. de Nantes.
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This is a study of Romanian NPIs. A licensing condition is proposed similar in spirit to Anastasia Giannakidou’s nonveridicality condition, though the Romanian NPI vreun is shown to be empirically more tightly sensitive to epistemic modality.
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Serbo-Croatian Negative Polarity Items

Progovac 1994 has been important not just for the study of Serbo-Croatian NPIs but also for positing a syntactic parallel between anaphors and NPIs (the “binding approach” to NPIs).

Progovac, Ljiljana. 1994. Positive and negative polarity: A binding approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511554308 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Progovac distinguishes two main types of NPIs in Serbo-Croatian and likens the constraints on their distribution to that of anaphoric pronouns. She proposes a syntactic parallelism between anaphora and NPI licensing.
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Free Choice Items

An important dissertation for free choice is LeGrand 1975, which identifies the phenomenon of what Jean Ehrenkranz LeGrand dubs “subtrigging,” the licensing of “any” in an otherwise hostile environment by a relative clause. More recent works include Menéndez-Benito 2005 and Vlachou 2007.

LeGrand, Jean Ehrenkranz. 1975. Or and any: The semantics and syntax of two logical operators. PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago.
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This work is cited often because it coined the term “subtrigging” for cases where “any” appears in a simple past sentence (an otherwise ungrammatical context), “saved” by a relative clause. LeGrand proposes a transformation that renders the structure equivalent to a conditional.
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Menéndez-Benito, Paula. 2005. The grammar of choice. PhD diss., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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This is a study of free choice, “any,” and Spanish FCIs. The analysis employs a Hamblin semantics for FCIs.
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Vlachou, Evangelia. 2007. Free choice items in and out of context: Semantics and distribution of French, Greek, and English free choice items. PhD diss., Univ. of Utrecht.
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This is a corpus-based study of Greek and French FCIs.
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Negation and Negative Concord

Classic citations are Zanuttini 1991, a study of Romance negative concord, and Laka 1990. More recent dissertations, such as Zeijlstra 2004 and Penka 2007, examine negative concord systems contrastively with nonconcord systems, such as those of Germanic languages. Giannakidou 1997 studies negative concord in Greek in chapter 4.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1997. The landscape of polarity items. PhD diss., Univ. of Groningen.
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Chapters 2 and 4 distinguish Greek nonemphatic NPIs from emphatic n-words, which enter negative concord structures. Chapter 4 offers an analysis of emphatic n-words as indefinites.
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Laka, Itziar. 1990. Negation in syntax: On the nature of functional categories and projections. PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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This work is often cited because (a) it coined the term “n-word” for the seemingly negative words that appear in negative concord structures in Romance languages and (b) it proposed the sigma projection to host negation or emphatic affirmation. The language focus is on Basque and Spanish.
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Penka, Doris. 2007. Negative indefinites. PhD diss., Univ. of Tübingen.
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This is a study of German n-words (such as kein [back]) and their scopal properties. The main thesis is that they involve an indefinite component and negation, and there is also typological discussion.
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Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1991. Syntactic properties of sentential negation: A comparative study of Romance languages. PhD diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania.
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This is a classic citation for the study of Italian negation and negative concord and also a classic citation for the so-called neg-criterion. It defined the basic terminology used in the studies of negative concord in the subsequent fifteen years.
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Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2004. Sentential negation and negative concord. PhD diss., Univ. of Amsterdam.
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This is a typological syntactic study of negative concord in a variety of language families, including Romance, Slavic, and Germanic.
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Books on Polarity, Indefinites, and Negation

In this section are books that discuss polarity items and negation in connection to negative polarity items (NPIs) and negative concord. (Not included are works whose main scope is negation itself.) Haspelmath 1997 on indefinites is a work of considerable empirical scope (Martin Haspelmath studies the distribution of indefinite pronouns in forty languages), and his typology has been implied in virtually every analysis of indefinites and polarity indefinites since. Giannakidou 1998 proposes to unify polarity indefinites and narrow-scope indefinites and offers formal analyses of polarity-sensitive items (NPIs, free choice items [FCIs], and n-words) as expressions with limited distribution because of their referential deficiencies. Horn 2001 is a classic and influential study of negation and phenomena related to it. De Swart 2010 is a typological study of negative concord and negation-related phenomena within the framework of optimality theory. Błaszczak 2001 presents a study of negation and negative concord in Slavic with emphasis on Polish, and Haegeman 1995 offers a syntactic approach to negation, expanding on the neg-criterion, and a case study of negation in West Flemish.

Błaszczak, Joanna. 2001. Investigation into the interaction between the indefinites and negation. Studia Grammatica 51. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
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This is a study of indefinites, polarity, and negative concord with special reference to Polish, other Slavic languages, and Germanic languages, mostly discussing syntactic issues.
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de Swart, Henriette. 2010. Expression and interpretation of negation: An OT typology. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
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This is an analysis of negative concord and negation within the framework of optimality theory. It also contains discussion of the acquisition of negation.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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This book augments the nonveridicality theory of polarity with discussion of why polarity items (PIs) are sensitive to nonveridicality. The Greek NPIs are nonscalar, and it is proposed that they are referentially deficient. They cannot refer to objects in the usual ways, and that is why they need to be in a nonveridical context. There is also discussion (chapter 4) of negative concord as involving a universal quantifier.
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Haegeman, Liliane M. V. 1995. The syntax of negation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This is a classic work on the syntax of negation and negative concord. The main language studied is West Flemish.
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Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite pronouns. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A typological study of great magnitude (forty languages are studied and compared) and extensively cited.
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Horn, Laurence R. 2001. A natural history of negation. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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This book discusses semantic and pragmatic aspects of negation and is a work of remarkable scholarship—the sources go back to Aristotle and his medieval commentators. The empirical phenomena studied include, among others, neg-raising, NPIs, “even,” “only,” and markedness of negation. Originally published in 1989 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press).
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Topics

In this section works are categorized by topic. The order of the topics is to some extent chronological. For instance, it starts with studies of English negative polarity items (NPIs) and questions that have emerged from the study of “any” (e.g., Is it a free choice item [FCI] or an NPI?). The section gradually moves on to topics that have emerged because of cross-linguistic study, such as free choice, NPIs, weak referentiality, and the relation among polarity, mood, and modality. Most of these works are articles, but some dissertations and books are included if they contain discussion relevant to the topic.

English Negative Polarity Items as Rhetorical Devices

Gilles Fauconnier (Fauconnier 1975, Fauconnier 1978) and Michael Israel (Israel 1996, Israel 2001, Israel 2011) can be seen as establishing the theory that NPIs and positive polarity items (PPIs) are devices for the rhetorical manipulation of the content of the sentences they occur in. Israel calls this model the scalar model of polarity: it holds that polarity sensitivity is sensitivity to scalar inferencing and that polarity items are themselves a special class of scalar operators. Fauconnier’s studies initiated this research with the properties of so-called quantificational superlatives, and Israel proposed a core distinction between emphatic and attenuating NPIs and PPIs. Postal 2004 discusses the rhetorical effects of “vulgar minimizers.”

Fauconnier, Gilles. 1975. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6:335–375.
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Fauconnier initiates in this paper the rhetorical model of NPIs by studying the properties of so-called quantificational superlatives first.
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Fauconnier, Gilles. 1978. Implication reversal in natural language. In Formal semantics and pragmatics for natural languages. Edited by Franz Guenthner and S. J. Schmidt, 289–302. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel.
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An extensive study of minimizers and their relation to negation: in negative contexts the implication is reversed, and this creates strong statements with negation and with rhetorical flavor.
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Israel, Michael. 1996. Polarity sensitivity as lexical semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 19:619–666.
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This is the first publication of Israel’s view of polarity, which builds on Fauconnier’s view of NPIs as rhetorical devices.
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Israel, Michael. 2001. Minimizers, maximizers, and the rhetoric of scalar reasoning. Journal of Semantics 18.4: 297–331.
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This work builds on Israel’s earlier work.
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Israel, Michael. 2011. The grammar of polarity: Pragmatics, sensitivity, and the logic of scales. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 127. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This is the most updated version of Israel’s theory of English NPIs, put in the more broad context of how lexical pragmatic reasoning impacts the grammar. The main claim is that polarity contexts are defined by their effects on scalar inferences, and that NPIs encode semantic properties that make them sensitive to such inferences.
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Postal, Paul. 2004. The structure of one type of American English vulgar minimizer. In Skeptical linguistic essays. By Paul Postal, 159–172. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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“Vulgar” minimizers are NPIs that contain offensive or euphemistic words, such as “shit,” “squat.” In certain contexts these can be used alone to convey some form of negation.
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“Any”: Negative Polarity Item or Free Choice Item?

Since the first description of “any” in Klima 1964, a central theme has been whether “any” is indeed one lexical item or ambiguous between an NPI and an FCI. The two seem to be distinguished in distribution—the NPI favors negation, questions, and downward entailment (DE) contexts, but the FCI reading is triggered in modal and generic contexts. They also differ in interpretation. In the NPI use, “any” is an existential quantifier, but in the FCI incarnation it appears to have the properties of a universal quantifier. This debate (discussion of which is also in Ladusaw 1980, cited under English Negative Polarity Items, and is still ongoing), impacts also the possible characterization of FCIs in other languages. Important citations are Aloni 2007, Carlson 1980, Davison 1980, Dayal 1998 (which proposes a unified theory of “any” as a universal quantifier), Kadmon and Landman 1993, Horn 2000, and Horn 2005, all of which propose unified theories of “any” as an indefinite.

Aloni, Maria. 2007. Free choice, modals, and imperatives. Natural Language Semantics 15:65–94.
DOI: 10.1007/s11050-007-9010-2 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper discusses the occurrence of “any” in imperative clauses. The goal is to understand better the properties of imperatives as they interact with the meaning of “any.”
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Carlson, Greg N. 1980. Polarity “any” is existential. Linguistic Inquiry 11.4: 799–804.
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Carlson proposes a separation of NPI and FCI “any,” with NPI “any” being existential.
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Davison, Alice. 1980. Any as universal or existential. In The semantics of determiners. Edited by J. van der Auwera, 11–34. London: Croom Helm.
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This work is cited often as the source of some of the core diagnostics for free choice “any,” for example, “almost” and “absolutely” modification.
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Dayal, Veneeta. 1998. Any as inherently modal. Linguistics and Philosophy 21:433–476.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1005494000753 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Dayal proposes a unified theory of “any” as a universal quantifier sensitive to the modality and contextual vagueness.
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Kadmon, Nirit, and Fred Landman. 1993. Any. Linguistics and Philosophy 16.4: 353–422.
DOI: 10.1007/BF00985272 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This often-cited study originated the “informational strengthening” approach to NPIs (see More Recent Strengthening Approaches to “Any”). It is proposed that “any” has widening force (i.e., it widens the denotation of its argument) and that widening triggers strengthening. Widening is supposed to be felicitous only if the sentence is informatively the strongest among possible alternatives. This theory has been quite influential, and Krifka 1995 (cited under More Recent Strengthening Approaches to “Any”) can be seen as developing it.
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Klima, Edward. 1964. Negation in English. In The structure of language. Edited by Jerry Fodor and Jerome Katz, 246–323. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
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This is the first recorded illustration of the distribution of “any.” Klima observes that “any” must be found in a context that has the “syntactico-pragmatic” feature [+affective]. The feature is syntactic and has no semantic content.
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Horn, Laurence R. 2000. Pick a theory: Not just any theory. In Negation and polarity: Syntactic and semantic perspectives. Edited by Laurence R. Horn and Y. Kato, 147–192. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Horn proposes a unified theory of “any” as an indefinite. An additional important contribution of this article is that it offers counterarguments to the diagnostics used to trace universal force.
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Horn, Laurence R. 2005. Airport ’86 revisited: Toward a unified indefinite any. In The Partee effect. Edited by Greg N. Carlson and Francis J. Pelletier, 179–205. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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Horn develops a unified theory of “any” as a Heimian indefinite. This approach is further developed for FCIs in chapter 3 of Giannakidou 1998 (cited under Books on Polarity, Indefinites, and Negation) and Giannakidou 2001 (cited under Free Choice Items: Quantificational Force and Licensing).
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Free Choice Items: Quantificational Force and Licensing

The works in this section address the debate about the nature of quantification with FCIs as well as the distributional constraints on FCIs. Giannakidou 2001 was the first to note that FCIs exhibit limited distribution characteristic of polarity items (PIs). FCIs avoid “episodic” contexts, making reference to a unique event (antiepisodicity) and thus favor the subset of nonveridical contexts that are not episodic. FCIs will avoid negation if the sentence is episodic, so their sensitivity is clearly distinct from that of NPIs. Anastasia Giannakidou also argues that FCIs are intensional indefinites. Jayez and Tovena 2005 proposes, in a similar spirit, the nonindividuation constraint on FCIs, which says that FCIs cannot be used in a referential situation. Saeboe 2001, on the other hand, argues that FCIs are universal quantifiers. Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002 and Menéndez-Benito 2010 treat FCIs as wh-words that produce Hamblin sets (i.e., sets of propositions), which will then be closed by adverbial quantifiers. In the study of FCIs we have a good number of languages, Indo-European and East Asian, that are known to contain the so-called wh-indeterminates, and the patterns observed are relatively uniform despite the differences in execution of ideas. For example, there is relative consensus that FCIs are in need of binding by sentential quantifiers, which explains their PI status and their need to be in a nonepisodic context. Giannakidou and Cheng 2006 further makes a major distinction between indefinite FCIs and definite ones; the latter come in free relative form or in “which” wh-form in Mandarin. Other important citations include Menéndez-Benito 2010, Saeboe 2001, and Zimmermann 2009.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2001. The meaning of free choice. Linguistics and Philosophy 24:659–735.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1012758115458 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This work brings free choice into the study of polarity and is an investigation of Greek FCIs (see Giannakidou 1998, cited under Books on Polarity, Indefinites, and Negation). FCIs are treated as indefinites, that is, variables, that are intensional (containing a world variable that must be bound) and carry a presupposition of exhaustive variation that is responsible for the universal flavor. This work also criticizes of Veneeta Dayal’s universal analysis of “any.”
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Giannakidou, Anastasia, and Lisa Cheng. 2006. (In)definiteness, polarity, and the role of wh-morphology in free choice. Journal of Semantics 23:135–183.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/ffl001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This work studies Greek and Mandarin FCIs and further develops the variable theory of FCIs by identifying definite FCIs. These are FCIs that appear with clausal complements (free relative clauses) and are not polarity sensitive. The paper also proposes that Mandarin dou, previously thought to be a universal quantifier, is in fact equivalent to the definite article in Greek.
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Jayez, Jacques, and Lucia Tovena. 2005. Free-choiceness and non-individuation. Linguistics and Philosophy 28:1–71.
DOI: 10.1007/s10988-005-1072-3 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a study of FCIs with reference to French that singles out nonindividuation as the crucial factor for FCI use. Nonindividuation says that typically FCIs will be usable in contexts where there is reference to particular individuals or situations and is close to Anastasia Giannakidou’s idea of intensional indefinites.
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Kratzer, Angelika, and Junko Shimoyama. 2002. Indeterminate phrases: The view from Japanese. In The proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics. Edited by Yukio Otsu, 1–25. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
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This study is important for bringing wh-indeterminates into the discussion and suggests a relevance of Hamblin alternatives in free choice phenomena. Wh-indeterminates are wh-phrases that receive interrogative as well as existential, universal, or free choice interpretations. The main languages discussed are Japanese and German, but wh-indeterminates appear typically in East Asian languages, Ancient Greek, and Latin.
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Menéndez-Benito, Paula. 2010. On universal free choice items. Natural Language Semantics 18:33–64.
DOI: 10.1007/s11050-009-9050-x Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Following Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, this work proposes a Hamblin semantics for Spanish FCIs. It is stipulated that sentences with FCIs contain two covert operators: an exhaustivity operator and a universal quantifier that closes the free choice (FC) Hamlin alternatives.
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Saeboe, Kjell Johan. 2001. The semantics of Scandinavian free choice items. Linguistics and Philosophy 24:737–787.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1012788916366 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a study of Scandinavian FCIs as universal quantifiers.
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Zimmermann, Malte. 2009. Variation in the expression of universal quantification and free choice: The case of Hausa koo-wh expressions. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 8:179–232.
DOI: 10.1075/livy.8.06zim Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
In this paper Zimmermann studies a paradigm of wh-indeterminate with FC in Hausa, an African language, and compares the classical variable analysis of FCIs to the Hamblin analysis. It is argued that the classical approach is successful and it is unnecessary to adopt a Hamblin analysis.
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Licensing and Downward Entailment

These works address aspects of the licensing question, the question of what the logical semantic property is that characterizes polarity environments—in English and cross-linguistically. Historically, the question is typically addressed with respect to NPIs and “any,” since with FCIs the answer to what licenses them (nonepisodicity, modality, quantificational contexts) is relatively simple. The DE theories are discussed in Dowty 1994 and von Fintel 1999, which offers Strawson DE, a nonclassical version of DE. Giannakidou 2006 and Horn 2002 are critical works. DE, or downward monotonicity, is a logical property of expressions: an expression is DE if it allows inference from sets to subsets in its scope. Importantly, a very influential paper, Zwarts 1998, correlates downward monotonicity to strength of negation, thus implying primacy to negation as a licensing force. Other references include Heim 1984 for criticism of classical DE in the conditional antecedent, Hoeksema 1983 for the claim that clausal but not phrase comparatives are DE, and Ladusaw 1983.

Dowty, David. 1994. The role of negative polarity and concord marking in natural language reasoning. In Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory IV. Edited by Mandy Harvey and Lynn Santelmann, 114–144. Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics.
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Dowty argues that the NPI’s main function is to mark the monotonicity (DE) of the context of appearance.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2006. ONLY, emotive factives, and the dual nature of polarity dependency. Language 82.3: 575–603.
DOI: 10.1353/lan.2006.0136 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This work presents a number of empirical and conceptual problems for the von Fintel 1999 notion of Strawson DE, the main one being that Strawson DE overgeneralizes, thus making a number of warring predictions. As an alternative, it is proposed that the theory of licensing must allow not just licensing but also a secondary option dubbed “rescuing.” Rescuing allows additional pragmatic reasoning that makes a negative proposition salient, to “save” the NPI. (“Rescuing” is called “indirect licensing” in Giannakidou 1997, cited under Greek Negative Polarity Items, and in Giannakidou 1998, cited under Books on Polarity, Indefinites, and Negation).
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Heim, Irene. 1984. A note on negative polarity and downward entailingness. In Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 14. Edited by C. Jones and P. Sells, 98–107. Amherst: Linguistics Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts.
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Heim presents problems for the DE of conditionals. She suggests that the DE pattern can only obtain under strengthening of the antecedent so as to exclude undesired cases.
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Hoeksema, Jacob. 1983. Negative polarity and the comparative. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3:403–434.
DOI: 10.1007/BF00142472 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Hoeksema proposes that NPIs are licensed in the clausal comparative because it is DE. It is also proposed that the phrasal comparative is upward entailing and thus does not license NPIs.
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Horn, Laurence R. 2002. Assertoric inertia and NPI-licensing. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society 38: Parasession on negation and polarity. Edited by M. Andronis, E. Debenport, A. Pycha, and K. Yoshimura, 55–82. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
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Horn addresses the licensing of “any” in the problematic environments of “only,” factives (the bulk of environments considered in von Fintel 1999 and Giannakidou 2006). He suggests that in order for licensing to happen, positive inferences become assertorically inert and only negative ones remain active. The account thus explains, for instance, why “almost” does not license “any” but “barely” and “hardly” do.
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Ladusaw, William. 1983. Logical form and conditions on grammaticality. Linguistics and Philosophy 6:373–392.
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Ladusaw proposes his view of NPIs as manifestations of semantic well-formedness as being part of grammar. Licensing is viewed as semantic filtering, that is, as a global condition on grammatical representations with NPIs.
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von Fintel, Kai. 1999. NPI licensing, Strawson entailment, and context dependency. Journal of Semantics 16.2: 97–148.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/16.2.97 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Von Fintel proposes the notion of Strawson DE to handle the problematic data of “any” with “only” and emotive factive verbs (e.g., “regret”) in English, known since Edward Klima and Marcia Linebarger. Von Fintel intends Strawson DE as a modification of classical DE that captures the case where the inference to the subset is part of the common ground. This theory is criticized in Giannakidou 2006 and Horn 2002.
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Zwarts, Frans. 1998. Three types of polarity. In Plural quantification. Edited by F. Hamm and E. Hinrichs, 177–238. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
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Zwarts presents his theory of monotonicity correlating with strength of negation. Three types of NPIs are distinguished, depending on how strong the negative licensors they need are: weak, strong, and superstrong. The stronger the licensor, the narrower the distribution of the NPI.
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Negative Polarity Items and Nonveridicality

These papers suggest the relevance of nonveridicality for NPI licensing. Nonveridicality, like DE, is a logical property of expressions, and it relates to uncertainty: an expression F is nonveridical if Fp does not entail p. NPI licensors typically carry this property, the extreme case being negation that is antiveridical. Zwarts 1995 also shows that all DE functions are nonveridical, so nonveridicality is a conservative extension of DE. Giannakidou 1995, Giannakidou 1999, and Zwarts 1995 emphasize the empirical inadequacy of the DE theories and the need to broaden the logical and empirical domain of licensing. Anastasia Giannakidou, in her study of Greek PIs, presents novel data showing unexpected—from the negation and DE perspective—occurrences of Greek NPIs and FCIs in uncertainty contexts (e.g., modal contexts, including subjunctive complements, imperatives, and disjunctions). Questions are also a problem for DE. The need to allow licensing in these contexts has been the main motivation for adopting nonveridicality. Not all NPIs are licensed in all nonveridical contexts—additional constraints are posed by the lexical semantics of the PIs as well as syntactic conditions of individual languages. Additional references in this context are Falaus 2009, Lee 1999, Lee 2002 for application of nonveridicality to Korean NPIs, and Pereltsvaig 2000, which compares the two approaches with reference to Slavic languages.

Falaus, Anamaria. 2009. Polarity items and dependent indefinites in Romanian. PhD diss., Univ. de Nantes.
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Falaus posits an epistemic constraint on the Romanian NPI vreun that is very similar to the nonveridicality requirement, as it requires that vreun appear in a sentence that “entails that the epistemic agent’s doxastic alternatives include non p-worlds.” Romanian NPIs appear in modal epistemic contexts and avoid deontic ones, such as the imperative.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1995. Subjunctive, habituality, and negative polarity. In Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory V. Edited by M. Simons and T. Galloway, 132–150. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Dept. of Linguistics.
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This is among the first records of NPIs occurring in subjunctive and habitual clauses and one of the first formulations of the nonveridicality theory of NPIs.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1999. Affective dependencies. Linguistics and Philosophy 22:367–421.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1005492130684 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This work lays out the basic theory of nonveridicality and Greek NPIs and discusses the nonveridicality of determiners. It shows a contrast between “each” and “both” (nonlicensors) and “every” and defines veridicality with determiners as a presupposition that the domain be nonempty. All presuppositional determiners are veridical and thus do not license NPIs.
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Lee, Chungmin. 1999. Types of NPIs and nonveridicality in Korean and other languages. In Syntax at sunset 2. Edited by Gianluca Storto, 96–132. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 3. Los Angeles: Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of California, Los Angeles.
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This is a study of two kinds of Korean NPIs showing that we are dealing with sensitivity to nonveridicality in both cases. The data are parallel to the Greek facts described in Anastasia Giannakidou’s work.
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Lee, Chungmin. 2002. Negative polarity in Korean and Japanese. Paper presented at the 10th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference held at UCLA, 13-15 October 2000. In Japanese-Korean linguistics. Vol. 10. Edited by Noriko Akatsuka and Susan Strauss, 481–494. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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This expands earlier observations and contains a more thorough discussion of Japanese.
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Pereltsvaig, Asya. 2000. Monotonicity-based vs. veridicality-based approaches to negative polarity: Evidence from Russian. In Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics: The Philadelphia Meeting 1999. Edited by Tracy Halloway King and I.A. Sekerina, 328–346. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic.
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This is a comparative study with data from Russian. This paper is also known for the so-called bagel problem, which refers to the fact that some apparent NPIs are not licensed by negation because of blocking or additional syntactic conditions.
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Zwarts, Frans. 1995. Nonveridical contexts. Linguistic Analysis 25:286–312.
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Zwarts launches a criticism of the DE approaches and shows the relevance of the nonveridicality theory for “any.” The paper is also well known for the proof that nonveridicality is a conservative extension of DE. Zwarts’s and Anastasia Giannakidou’s works are the standard citations for the nonveridicality approach to polarity.
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Narrow Scope Indefinites, Weak Referentiality, and Negative Polarity Items

Nonreferentiality or generally some kind of referential deficiency is often implied in the studies that posit sensitivity of NPIs to nonveridicality or nonexistence. Haspelmath 1997 (cited under Books on Polarity, Indefinites, and Negation) singles out indefinites that are “epistemically nonspecific,” and Giannakidou 1998 (chapters 1, 3) embeds the narrow scope property of NPIs into the nonspecificity, bare noun, narrow scope phenomena. Likewise, Borschev, et al. 2008 and Partee 2008 make the connection explicit in their studies of the genitive of negation in Russian, and Farkas 2002 talks about extreme nonspecificity and, in her earlier work, about the subjunctive relative clauses being intensional and thus nonreferring. Den Dikken and Giannakidou 2002 assesses the question of what makes a wh-phrase a candidate for NPI status, and Farkas 2002 talks about extreme nonspecificity in Romanian. Fernald and Perkins 2006 discusses Navajo NPIs; Matthewson 1998 discusses Salish NPIs, chapter 4; Partee 2008 addresses the question of intensionality and narrow scope; and Giannakidou 2009 analyzes the subjunctive tense and temporal NPI.

Borschev, Vladimir, Elena V. Paducheva, Barbara H. Partee, Yakov G. Testelets, and Igor Yanovich. 2008. Russian genitives, non-referentiality, and the property-type hypothesis. In Proceedings of the Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Stony Brook Meeting 2007 (FASL) 16. Edited by A. Antonenko, J.F. Bailyn, and C. Bethin, 48–67. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic.
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This is a study of the constraints of the genitive of negation, a nonreferential nominal, in Russian. Nonveridical contexts are good for the genitive of negation, but the constraints are a bit more complex.
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den Dikken, Marcel, and Anastasia Giannakidou. 2002. Aggressively non-D-linked phrases as polarity items. Linguistic Inquiry 33:31–61.
DOI: 10.1162/002438902317382170 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Certain properties of “wh-the hell” phrases are explained (their in situ property, their need to be in a nonveridical context, their rhetorical effects in questions) by an analysis of them as NPIs and referentially deficient expressions.
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Farkas, Donka F. 2002. Extreme non-specificity in Romanian. In Romance languages and linguistic theory 2000. Edited by Claire Beyssade, R. Bok-Bennema, F. Drijkoningen, and P. Monachesi, 127–151. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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This study does not make the connection to polarity, but the property of extreme nonspecificity is close to the notions of referential deficiency and weak referentiality assumed in Giannakidou 1998 and Partee 2008.
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Fernald, Theodore B., and Ellavina Perkins. 2006. Negative polarity items in Navajo. In Proceedings of the Dene (Athabaskan) Languages Conference (ALC) 2006. Edited by A. Berez, S. Gessner, and S. Tuttle, 19–48. Alaska Native Language Center Working Papers 7. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center.
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This is a study of referentially deficient NPIs in Navajo.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Chapters 1 and 3 introduce the idea that Greek nonemphatic NPIs are deficient existentials that cannot introduce discourse referents. They are argued to contain designated variables, called “dependent” and later “nondeictic” (see Giannakidou 2011, cited under Overview Articles in Handbooks).
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2009. The dependency of the subjunctive revisited: Temporal semantics and polarity. Lingua 119.12: 1883–1908.
DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2008.11.007 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This study extends the deficient variable idea to the subjunctive mood, which is analyzed as a referentially deficient tense that becomes an NPI. The main data discussed are from Greek.
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Matthewson, Lisa. 1998. Determiner systems and quantificational strategies: Evidence from Salish. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.
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In chapter 4 Matthewson discusses the NPI determiner ku, which creates a narrow-scope indefinite appearing in nonveridical contexts only. The use of this indefinite indicates that the speaker is unable to assert existence of the referent.
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Partee, Barbara H. 2008. Negation, intensionality, and aspect: Interaction with NP semantics. In Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect. Edited by Susan D. Rothstein, 291–317. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Partee discusses the correlation among nonveridicality, nonexistence, intensionality, and negation and the way these properties of the context affect the interpretation of dependent nominal, such as the genitive of negation in Russian.
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More Recent Strengthening Approaches to “Any”

This section addresses the problem of scalarity and strengthening of “any” and looks conceptualizations of strengthening within the theory of focus (Krifka 1995) and more articulated ideas of informational strength (van Rooy 2003). For a detailed criticism of these approaches, see Giannakidou 2011 (cited under Overview Articles in Handbooks) and the critical works Duffley and Larrivée 2010 and Hoeksema 2008. It is also important to note that almost all of these works (with the possible exception of Hoeksema 2008) discuss “any” and English minimizers. Other important references include Borkin 1971, a study of English NPIs in questions; Chierchia 2006; Guerzoni and Sharvit 2007; and Hoeksema 2008, a response to Guerzoni and Sharvit 2007.

Borkin, Ann. 1971. Polarity items in questions. In Papers from the 7th Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, April 16–18, 1971, 53–62. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
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This is the standard citation for the observation that NPIs, such as minimizers, give rise to rhetorical effects in questions.
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Chierchia, Gennaro. 2006. Broaden your views: Implicatures of domain widening and the “logicality” of language. Linguistic Inquiry 37:535–590.
DOI: 10.1162/ling.2006.37.4.535 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Chierchia proposes a unified theory of NPI and FCI “any” within a theory of conversational implicature that assumes that implicatures are projected syntactically. The theory relies heavily on Kadmon and Landman 1993 (cited under “Any”: Negative Polarity Item or Free Choice Item?) and Krifka 1995 though differing from these in the syntactic treatment of implicature.
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Duffley, Patrick, and Pierre Larrivée. 2010. Anyone for non-scalarity? English Language and Linguistics 14.1: 1–17.
DOI: 10.1017/S1360674309990402 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The authors question the omnipresence of scalarity with “any” and argue that, in the contexts of questions, negations, conditionals, and “before,” “any” need not be scalar. Scalarity of “any” correlates with a different intonational pattern (one where “any” is more emphatic).
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Guerzoni, Elena, and Yael Sharvit. 2007. A question of strength: On NPIs in interrogative clauses. Linguistics and Philosophy 30:361–391.
DOI: 10.1007/s10988-007-9014-x Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The author claim that two factors are responsible for NPI licensing in questions: strong exhaustivity and Strawson DE. It remains open why, as claimed, strongly exhaustive environments are licensors of NPIs and how strength is related to Strawson DE. The empirical claims that motivate this account are challenged in Hoeksema 2008.
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Hoeksema, Jacob. 2008. There is no number effect in the licensing of negative polarity items: A reply to Guerzoni and Sharvit. Linguistics and Philosophy 31:397–407.
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Hoeksema provides counterexamples to the Guerzoni and Sharvit 2007 claim that plural, but not singular, wh-phrases may contain an NPI and that this correlates with exhaustivity. He argues that this claim is factually incorrect and that the theory of NPIs does not need to be complicated by taking number distinctions into account.
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Krifka, Manfred. 1995. The semantics and pragmatics of polarity items in assertion. Linguistic Analysis 25:209–257.
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This paper makes the important contribution that NPIs resemble items in focus and thus introduce alternatives (as in Mats Rooth’s classical theory of focus). The alternatives introduce an ordering relation of semantic specificity, where the NPI itself denotes the most specific element in the order. A notion of emphatic assertion is also defined, and various English NPIs are discussed, including “any,” minimizers, and NPIs such as “at all.”
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van Rooy, Robert. 2003. Negative polarity items in questions: Strength as relevance. Journal of Semantics 20:239–273.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/20.3.239 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Van Rooy claims that strength in questions must be reduced to “entropy.” Entropy is the measure of the informative value of a question. The informative value of question Q is maximal just in case the answers to Q are all equally likely to be true. The value becomes less than maximal when an NPI occurs (resulting in biased readings).
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Polarity and “Even”

In Krifka 1995 (cited under More Recent Strengthening Approaches to “Any”) the study of “any” is embedded into the theory of focus. Though whether “any” itself is always focused and scalar is still an open question (see Duffley and Larrivée 2010, cited under More Recent Strengthening Approaches to “Any”), two important facts suggest that, at least for some NPIs, a connection with focus is desirable: (a) some NPIs contain the focus particle “even,” and (b) the very word “even” in many languages appears to be an NPI. The observation that the English word “even” has an NPI incarnation goes back to Rooth 1995. The opposite view is in Karttunen and Peters 1979. In this section are works that address the role of “even” in NPI formation and interpretation. Guerzoni 2004 and Lahiri 1998 are accounts in support of the scope theory with data from English and Hindi. Rullmann 2003 discusses the closely related additive particle “either” and proposes a polarity analysis. Though English contains only one word for “even,” it becomes evident in the works cited here that languages employ a rich repertory of “even” words, most of them being polarity sensitive. Evidence for polarity “evens” comes from Greek (Giannakidou 2007), Spanish (Herburger 2003), Dutch (Hoeksema and Rullmann 2001), Korean (Lee 2010), Japanese (Yoshimura 2007), and German (Schwarz 2005 and earlier works in German referenced therein). These are the main languages that have been studied in this connection.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2007. The Landscape of EVEN. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 25:39–81.
DOI: 10.1007/s11049-006-9006-5 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Giannakidou presents arguments against the scope theory of “even” by studying new data from three words meaning “even” in Greek, all sensitive to polarity. One is a strong NPI, licensed only in antiveridical contexts (negation, “without”); another is a positive polarity item (PPI), dispreferred with negation; and the third, esto, is a broad NPI licensed in nonveridical contexts. It is esto that is responsible for negative bias in questions.
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Guerzoni, Elena. 2004. EVEN-NPIs in questions. Natural Language Semantics 12:319–343.
DOI: 10.1007/s11050-004-8739-0 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a paper in support of the scope theory of English “even” that discusses primarily the word “even” in questions.
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Herburger, Elena. 2003. A note on Spanish ni siquiera, even, and the analysis of NPIs. Probus 15:237–256.
DOI: 10.1515/prbs.2003.009 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a study of Spanish “evens” supporting the NPI theory: ni-siquiera is an NPI “even.”
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Hoeksema, Jacob, and Hotze Rullmann. 2001. Scalarity and polarity: A study of scalar adverbs as polarity items. In Perspectives on negation and polarity items. Edited by Jacob Hoeksema, Hotze Rullmann, Victor Sánchez-Valencia, and Ton van der Wouden, 129–171. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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This is a study of two NPI “even” particles in Dutch giving rise to NPIs with slightly different distributions. The paper presents a lot of corpus data and discusses also the role of Dutch “evens” in quantificational superlatives.
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Karttunen, Lauri, and Stanley Peters. 1979. Conventional implicature. In Presupposition. Edited by Choon-Kyu Oh and David A. Dinneen, 1–56. Syntax and Semantics 11. New York: Academic.
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Argues that “even” simply scopes above negation (the scope theory).
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Lahiri, Utpal. 1998. Focus and negative polarity in Hindi. Natural Language Semantics 6:57–123.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008211808250 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper is about Hindi “one” plus “even” NPIs. These are licensed broadly in nonveridical contexts. The paper also contends that “any” cannot contain “even,” since, for example, it does not give rise to negative bias in questions, as Hindi NPIs and minimizers (which arguably do contain a covert “even”) do.
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Lee, Jung-Huyck. 2010. Nonveridical dependency: Korean and Japanese focus particles. Paper presented at the 17th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference held at UCLA, November 2007. In Japanese-Korean linguistics. Vol. 17. Edited by Shoichi Iwasaki, Hajime Hoji, Patricia M. Clancy, and Sung-Ock Sohn, 231–245. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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This is a work on Korean “even” items, and a striking parallel is presented between Greek and Korean “even” words.
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Rooth, Mats. 1995. Association with focus. PhD diss., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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This is a classical and very influential study of focus. Rooth suggests that the word “even” in English is ambiguous and that one of its incarnations is an NPI.
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Rullmann, Hotze. 2003. Additive particles and polarity. Journal of Semantics 20:329–401.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/20.4.329 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Rullmann discusses the particles “also” and the NPI “either” and shows that they have fixed scopes with respect to negation.
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Schwarz, Bernhard. 2005. Scalar additive particles in negative contexts. Natural Language Semantics 13:125–168.
DOI: 10.1007/s11050-004-2441-0 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This works discusses German data from “even.”
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Yoshimura, Keiko. 2007. Focus and polarity in Japanese: EVEN and ONLY. PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago.
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This is an extensive study of the focus particles “even” and “only” in Japanese. It addresses their role in NPI formation and their general interactions with polarity.
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“Only” and Negative Polarity Items

The fact that the English exclusive focus particle “only” allows NPIs has puzzled semanticists, because “only” is not logically DE. Atlas 1993, Atlas 1996, and Horn 1996 debate what the proper analysis of “only” is and why it appears to be a favorable environment for NPIs. Giannakidou 2006 points out that “only” is veridical and does not license NPIs in Greek. The veridical property of “only” supports Jay D. Atlas’s view that the prejacent p must be entailed. Beaver and Clark 2003 points out asymmetries between “always” and “only,” and Yoshimura presents a Japanese particle “only,” shika, which is an NPI itself.

Atlas, Jay D. 1993. The importance of being only: Testing the neo-Gricean versus neo-entailment paradigms. Journal of Semantics 10:301–318.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/10.4.301 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Atlas points out the problematic nature of logical DE for “only” and questions some of the NPI data.
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Atlas, Jay D. 1996. Only noun phrases, pseudo-negative quantifiers, negative polarity items, and monotonicity. Journal of Semantics 13:265–328.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/13.4.265 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Following Atlas 1993, this article further critiques the DE property of “only” and proposes a theory of “only” where “only p” entails the positive prejacent proposition p. If this is so, then the status of “only” as an NPI licensor is quite problematic.
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Beaver, David, and Brady Clark. 2003. Always and only: Why not all focus sensitive operators are alike. Natural Language Semantics 11:323–362.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1025542629721 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper contains comparative data mainly from English (but also some German and Dutch) to show that “always” and “only” differ in the ways of associating with focus.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2006. Only, emotive factive verbs, and the dual nature of polarity dependency. Language 82:575–603.
DOI: 10.1353/lan.2006.0136 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Giannakidou shows that it is not a general property of words meaning “only” to license NPIs—Greek “only” does not license NPIs. This is because “only” is veridical (it entails the positive prejacent), and we do not expect it to license NPIs. The occurrences of “liberal” NPIs, such as “any” and English minimizers, then, is a case of “rescuing” via additional pragmatic reasoning that makes available a negative proposition (the exclusive component of “only”).
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Horn, Laurence R. 1996. Exclusive company: Only and the dynamics of vertical inference. Journal of Semantics 13:1–40.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/13.1.1 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Horn’s view, which contrasts with that of Jay D. Atlas, is that “only p” does not entail p but presupposes an existential statement based on p. “Only” is a licensor because it is downward asserting via the exclusive proposition, not DE.
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Yoshimura, Keiko. 2007. EVEN and ONLY: Focus and polarity in Japanese. PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago.
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In chapter 5 the Japanese NPI shika, “only,” is studied, one of the rare occurrences of an NPI “only” word.
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Syntactic Conditions on Negative Polarity Items Licensing, Intervention Phenomena, Parasitic Licensing

The works in this section address syntactic details of licensing, such as intervention phenomena (Linebarger 1987, Jackson 1995, Guerzoni 2006), so-called parasitic licensing (den Dikken 2002, Hoeksema 2007), and licensing as moving above the scope of the licensing element (Giannakidou 1998, chapter 4; see also Giannakidou 2000, cited under Greek N-Words). Uribe-Etxeberria 1994 is a classic reference for the study of “any” appearing to precede negation at surface structure; see also Giannakidou 1998, chapter 4, for some discussion of this question. De Swart 2000 discusses split scope with Germanic n-words and modal verbs.

den Dikken, Marcel. 2002. Direct and parasitic polarity item licensing. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 45:33–66.
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Den Dikken discusses the Dutch NPI “heel,” whose syntactic legitimacy seems to depend on previous NPI licensing. This is the first on-record report of the phenomenon.
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de Swart, Henriëtte. 2000. Scope ambiguities with negative quantifiers. In Reference and anaphoric relations. Edited by K. von Heusinger and U. Egli, 109–132. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-3947-2 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A pragmatic explanation is attempted for the scope interaction of Germanic negative quantifiers, negation, and modal verbs.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Discussion of certain specificity effects in connection with the question of whether the c-command constraint on NPIs must be stated at LF or s-structure is in chapter 4. In the same chapter one finds the first formulation of the idea that n-word NPIs must move abovetheir licensor (i.e., negation) and thus licensing does not always correspond to a be-in-the-scope of condition.
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Guerzoni, Elena. 2006. Intervention effects on NPIs and feature movement: Towards a unified account of intervention. Natural Language Semantics 14:359–398.
DOI: 10.1007/s11050-007-9008-9 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper explores the possibility of understanding locality restrictions on the distribution of NPIs as a consequence of covert movement. It restates Marcia Linebarger’s immediate scope constraint in terms of morphology-driven checking requirements.
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Hoeksema, Jacob. 2007. Parasitic licensing of negative polarity items. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 10:163–182.
DOI: 10.1007/s10828-007-9012-y Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper discusses the so-called parasitic licensing of NPIs, that is, licensing that depends on previous licensing of an NPI. The data are mainly drawn from Dutch. Giannakidou 2007 (cited under Polarity and “Even”) suggests parasitic licensing of NPI “even” in Greek, inspired by such analyses.
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Jackson, Eric. 1995. Weak and strong negative polarity items: Licensing and intervention. PhD diss., Stanford Univ.
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This is an extensive study of intervention phenomena in English.
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Linebarger, Marcia. 1987. Negative polarity and grammatical representation. Linguistics and Philosophy 10:325–387.
DOI: 10.1007/BF00584131 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Linebarger proposes her very influential immediate scope constraint, which postulates that NPI must be found in the immediate scope of negation with no other scope-bearing elements interfering.
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Uribe-Etxebarria, Miriam. 1994. Interface licensing conditions on negative polarity licensing: A theory of polarity and tense interactions. PhD diss., Univ. of Connecticut.
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This study addresses the scope conditions on NPIs and argues that the apparent surface c-command constraint (Any student didn’t come) must be stated as an LF constraint.
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Neg-Raising

Neg-raising is the phenomenon in which a negation in the main clause seems to convey a stronger statement with negation in the lower clause (e.g., I don’t believe that this is good work conveys that I believe that this is not good work). Horn 1978 is the classic reference, and Gajewski 2007 contains interesting new discussion.

Gajewski, Jon. 2007. Neg-raising and polarity. Linguistics and Philosophy 30:289–328.
DOI: 10.1007/s10988-007-9020-z Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper discusses NPI licensing in neg-raising contexts. Specific features of presupposition projection are used to explain the licensing of strict NPIs under neg-raising verbs.
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Horn, Laurence. 1978. Remarks on neg-raising. In Pragmatics. Edited by Peter Cole, 129–220. Syntax and Semantics 9. New York: Academic.
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In this classic and much-cited paper Horn identifies the phenomenon of neg-raising and offers a pragmatic explanation of it within his theory of Q and R implicature.
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Expletive Negation and Mood

The connection between mood and polarity is often made, most notably in the notion of polarity subjunctive, the subjunctive triggered under negation in Romance languages, Greek, and some other Balkan languages (see Giannakidou 2009, Quer 2001, Quer 2009). In more recent discussions, the subjunctive mood is treated as a polarity item with a temporal deficiency (Giannakidou 2009). At the same time, expletive negation has also been argued to behave as an NPI (Espinal 2007, Yoon 2010) and perhaps even as a mood marker, as Yoon 2010 suggests. Farkas 1985 studies the use of the subjunctive in relative clauses and argues that subjunctive modification creates an intensional description that applies to an object that need not exist.

Espinal, Maria Teresa. 2007. Licensing expletive negation and negative concord in Romance languages. In La négation dans les langues romanes. Edited by Franck Floricic, 49–74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Espinal suggests that there is a correlation between expletive negation and nonveridicality and antiveridicality in Catalan and Spanish expletive negation. The approach is mainly syntactic.
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Farkas, Donka F. 1985. Intensional descriptions and the Romance subjunctive mood. New York: Garland.
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In this published version of the author’s PhD dissertation we find the idea that the subjunctive mood creates an intensional description that applies to objects that do not necessarily exist. Giannakidou 1998 (cited under Books on Polarity, Indefinites, and Negation) further shows that intensional descriptions can apply felicitously only in nonveridical contexts, since these do not warrant existence.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2009. The dependency of the subjunctive revisited: Temporal semantics and polarity. Lingua 119.12: 1883–1908.
DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2008.11.007 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Giannakidou proposes an analysis of the subjunctive mood in Greek as involving a deficient temporal variable that renders it polarity sensitive and explains the fact that the subjunctive is selected by nonveridical predicates.
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Quer, Josep. 2001. Interpreting mood. Probus 13:81–111.
DOI: 10.1515/prbs.13.1.81 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a detailed study of mood shift in Catalan in the author’s theory of model shift, that is, changing an individual’s perspective. The paper also contains discussion of the polarity subjunctive.
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Quer, Josep. 2009. Twists of mood: The distribution and interpretation of the indicative and the subjunctive. Lingua 119:1779–1787.
DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2008.12.003 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is an overview piece addressing fundamental questions in the study of mood and the relation between mood and polarity.
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Yoon, Suwon. 2010. NOT in the mood: The semantics and pragmatics of expletive negation. PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago.
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This work is a detailed study of the phenomenon of expletive negation and a case study of Korean expletive negation. It offers a helpful interview of previous works and proposes that expletive negation is like a subjunctive mood marker in Greek, subject to licensing by nonveridicality. It also proposes that there is an evaluative component in expletive negation.
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“Before,” Nonveridicality, and Negative Polarity Items

The interaction between temporal structure and polarity is well known (e.g., the contrast “yet” versus “already”and the fact that NPIs are licensed in “before”clauses). The works in this section address some aspects of these interactions. “Before” has been known to license NPIs, though it is logically nonmonotonic. It is, however, nonveridical. Important works are Sánchez-Valencia, et al. 1993; Beaver and Condoravdi 2003; and Giannakidou and Zwarts 1997, which is one of the few works that discuss data besides English—the Greek “before,” prin—and proposes a nonveridical analysis of it. Also important is the debate between Condoravdi 2010 and Krifka 2010. Krifka 2010 includes some German data as well.

Beaver, David, and Cleo Condoravi. 2003. A uniform analysis of before and after. In Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory XIII. Edited by Robert B. Young and Yuping Zhou, 37–54. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Dept. of Linguistics.
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A uniform account of “before” and “after” sentences is proposed by positing a covert operator “earliest.”
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Condoravdi, Cleo. 2010. NPI licensing in temporal clauses. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28:877–910.
DOI: 10.1007/s11049-010-9115-z Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Condoravdi gives an account of “before” that involves coercion of propositions to the earliest or maximal times at which the propositions are true plus a modal component for nonfactual interpretations. Krifka 2010 objects to this analysis and proposes an alternative.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia, and Frans Zwarts. 1999. Aspectual properties of temporal connectives. In Greek linguistics ’97: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Greek Linguistics. Edited by A. Mozer, 104–113. Athens, Greece: Ellinika Grammata.
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This paper offers a nonveridical analysis of Greek “before,” prin, and generalizes a contrast between the “prospective” aspect, which licenses NPIs, and the “retrospective” (“before,” future), which does not.
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Krifka, Manfred. 2010. Before and after without coercion: Comment on the paper by Cleo Condoravdi. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28:911–929.
DOI: 10.1007/s11049-010-9116-y Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Krifka criticizes the coercion operators proposed in Condoravdi 2010. He favors a nonmodal, noncoercive analysis of clauses like [A before B] as “A is the case when B has not been the case,” triggering a conversational implicature that B will be the case later.
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Sánchez-Valencia, Victor, Ton van der Wouden, and Frans Zwarts. 1993. Polarity, veridicality, and temporal connectives. In Proceedings of the 9th Amsterdam Colloquium. Edited by Paul Dekker and Martin Stokhof, 587–606. Amsterdam: Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, Univ. of Amsterdam.
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Argues that “before” is nonveridical and that nonveridicality correlates with DE.
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“Until” and Negative Polarity Items

“Until” is known to have an NPI incarnation (Karttunen 1974). Mittwoch 1977 objects to this, but see Declerck 1995, de Swart 1996, and Giannakidou 2002 for discussion of “until” supporting the NPI analysis with data from Greek, French, and Dutch. The debate overall parallels that on “even.”

Declerck, Renaat. 1995. The problem of not . . . until. Linguistics 33:51–98.
DOI: 10.1515/ling.1995.33.1.51 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Thorough discussion of English and French data from “until.”
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de Swart, Henriette. 1996. Meaning and use of not . . . until. Journal of Semantics 13:221–263.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/13.3.221 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a paper in support of the NPI nature of “until.” It also contains discussion of how negation affects predication and claims that negation stativizes the verb meaning.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2002. UNTIL, aspect, and negation: A novel argument for two untils. In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XII. Edited by Brendan Jackson, 84–103. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Giannakidou shows that Greek contains an NPI “until” lexically distinct from regular “until.” Greek “not . . . until” is realized by an exceptive phrase, just like ne . . . que in French. The paper shows that the NPI reading is not captured by Anita Mittwoch’s scope theory of “even.”
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Karttunen, Lauri. 1974. Until. Chicago Linguistic Society 10:283–297.
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Identifies “until” with negation as an NPI.
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Mittwoch, Anita. 1977. Negative sentences with until. Chicago Linguistic Society 13:410–417.
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Mittwoch proposes a scope alternative to Lauri Karttunen’s NPI “until.”
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Positive Polarity Items

PPIs, first discussed in Baker 1970, have the “boring” (according to Szabolcsi 2004) property of wanting to escape the scope of negation. In the early days, they were treated as duals of NPIs, for example, “any” versus “some.” More recent works reveal a more nuanced distribution of the classical NPIs (e.g., “some”; see Szabolcsi 2004) and treat speaker-oriented adverbs as PPIs too (Nilsen 2003, Ernst 2009). With the exception of Nilsen 2003, none of the works here claims that PPIs are scalar (see also discussion in Giannakidou 2011). In fact, Szabolcsi 2004 argues that “some” is not scalar, and Ernst 2009 offers arguments against Oystein Nilsen’s scalar analysis. Another important citation is Szabolcsi 2002.

Baker, Carl L. 1970. Double negatives. Linguistic Inquiry 1:169–186.
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This is one of the classical first citations of PPIs in English, and it establishes some of the basic distributional patterns as well as the duality of NPIs and PPIs.
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Ernst, Thomas. 2009. Speaker oriented adverbs. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 27:497–544.
DOI: 10.1007/s11049-009-9069-1 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
In this empirically rich paper Ernst offers an analysis of speaker-oriented adverbs in English, such as “unfortunately” and “possibly,” as PPIs. Three classes of PPI adverbs are distinguished, and the crucial property regulating their distribution is veridicality. The PPIs will not be accepted in veridical contexts, that is, contexts that express full speaker commitment.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2011. Negative and positive polarity items: Licensing, compositionality, and variation. In Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning. 2d ed. Edited by Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, and Paul Portner, 166–171. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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In section 9, “Positive Polarity Items,” it is argued that intonation functions as PPI marking in English and that only emphatic “some” is a PPI.
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Nilsen, Oystein. 2003. Eliminating positions. PhD diss., Univ. of Utrecht.
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Nilsen defines a scalar notion of domain shrinking (the opposite of widening) to account for the distribution of “possibly” in English. This is not a general theory of PPIs; see Ernst 2009 for criticism.
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Szabolcsi, Anna. 2002. Hungarian disjunctions and positive polarity. Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian, 24–26 May 2001. In Approaches to Hungarian. Vol. 8, Papers from the Budapest Conference. Edited by István Kenesei and Peter Siptár, 217–241. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado.
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This paper studies contrastively the behavior of disjunction in English and Hungarian, where disjunctive “or” does not seem to be interpreted inside the scope of negation.
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Szabolcsi, Anna. 2004. Positive polarity—negative polarity. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22:409–452.
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This is an empirically broad study of English PPIs, mostly with emphasis on “some.” It is argued that “some” is not scalar and that “not” plus “some” is a kind of NPI licensed in antiadditive contexts.
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Processing of Negative Polarity Items

The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw some important studies of NPI processing. Most of them concern English and German NPIs, and they address core questions, such as the nature of licensing and whether NPI processing comes with a cost. Some of the studies employ behavioral tasks (reading, inference verification tasks; see e.g. Szabolcsi, et al. 2008), and others employ electrophysiological measures, such as event related potentials (ERPs). Some have discovered an interesting pattern that has been labeled “illusionary licensing” (Xiang, et al. 2009) or “intrusion of the ungrammatical into the grammatical” (Vasishth, et al. 2008). They all seem to agree that the psychological profile we get for polarity is not identical to that observed with purely syntactic phenomena but it also cannot be reduced to mere pragmatic failures. These conclusions are consistent with William Ladusaw’s and Anastasia Giannakidou’s view that NPIs are grammatical creatures, sensitive to semantic and syntactic aspects of the context of appearance. Important references in this connection are Drenhaus, et al. 2007; Drenhaus, et al. 2006; Saddy, et al. 2004; and Steinhauer, et al. 2010).

Drenhaus, Heiner, Peter beim Graben, Stefan Frisch, and Douglas Saddy. 2006. Diagnosis and repair of negative polarity constructions in the light of symbolic resonance analysis. Brain and Language 96:255–268.
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2005.05.001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A study of German NPIs. It investigates differences in event-related potentials of NPIs and examines the failure to license an NPI in German. A biphasic N400–P600 response was found for the two induced violations (the lack of licensor and the inaccessibility of negation in a relative clause). The findings suggest that the failure in licensing NPIs is not exclusively related to semantic integration costs (N400). The elicited P600 components reflect differences in syntactic processing.
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Drenhaus, Heiner, Joanna Błaszczak, and Juliane Schütte. 2007. Some psycholinguistic comments on NPI licensing. In Sinn und Bedeutung 11: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 21-23 September 2006. Edited by Estela Puig Waldmüller, 180–193. Tarrasa, Spain: E. Puig.
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This work looks at German NPIs in negation and in question contexts. The authors discover that the licensor makes a difference and take this to support the nonveridical hypothesis.
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Saddy, Douglas, Heiner Drenhaus, and Stefan Frisch. 2004. Processing polarity items: Contrastive licensing costs. Brain and Language 90:405–502.
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A contrastive study of German NPIs and PPIs. The results reveal distinct processing reflexes associated with failure to license PPIs in comparison to failure to license NPIs.
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Steinhauer, Karsten, John E. Drury, Paul Portner, Matthew Walenski, and Michael T. Ullman. 2010. Syntax, concepts, and logic in the temporal dynamics of language comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials. Neuropsychologia 48:1525–1542.
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.01.013 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
In this study unlicensed NPIs elicited a late P600 followed in onset by a late left anterior negativity (or L-LAN), an ERP profile that has also appeared elsewhere in studies targeting logical semantics. The finding supports the view that NPI licensing is not mere pragmatic integration.
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Szabolcsi, Anna, Lewis Bott, and Brian McElree. 2008. The effect of negative polarity items on inference verification. Journal of Semantics 25:411–450.
DOI: 10.1093/jos/ffn008 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This work tests with inference verification tasks the prediction of scalar theories of NPIs that NPIs should facilitate inference to subsets. It is found that, contrary to expectations, no facilitation was observed when the NPI was present and rather the NPI significantly slowed down reading times in the inference region. This result supports theories of NPIs arguing that the NPI contributes complexity.
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Vasishth, Shravan, Richard Lewis, Sven Brüssow, and Heiner Drenhaus. 2008. Processing polarity: How the ungrammatical intrudes on the grammatical. Cognitive Science 32:685–712.
DOI: 10.1080/03640210802066865 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is the first record of the illusory effect of NPIs, with German data.
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Xiang, M., B. Dillon, and C. Phillips. 2009. Illusory licensing effects across dependency types: ERP evidence. Brain and Language 108.1: 40–55.
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2008.10.002 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This study confirms the illusory effect for English NPIs and treats it as an attempt on the part of the speaker to rescue the NPI with additional pragmatic reasoning. This seems to support the rescuing idea of NPIs as a secondary mechanism (see Giannakidou 2006, section “NPIs and DE,” cited under Licensing and Downward Entailment).
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Negative Polarity, N-Words in Negative Concord

In this section are studies of n-words. The term was coined in Laka 1990 (cited under Negation and Negative Concord) and refers to nominal and adverbial constituents that appear in negative concord (NC). N-words cross-linguistically form a heterogeneous class in terms of both their distribution and their semantic properties, but they all meet the criteria of Giannakidou 2006 (cited under Overview Papers on N-Words): (a) they can be used in structures containing sentential negation yielding a reading equivalent to one logical negation, and (b) they can provide a negative fragment answer. This definition is general enough to capture the data across languages, and it can serve as the basis for distinguishing between “weaker” and “stronger” n-words, stronger being those that needsentential negation in all positions. This pattern is labeled “strict NC” (Giannakidou 1998, see Books on Polarity, Indefinites, and Negation) and characterizes Slavic, Greek, Hungarian, and Romanian NC as opposed to Romance NC, which allows the preverbal n-words to be acceptable without negation and is thus “nonstrict NC.” Given that multiple occurrences of n-words or co-occurrence of n-words with negation give rise to only onelogical negation, an important theme has been what the proper semantic characterization is of n-words and how their semantic meaning maps onto morphological or syntactic features. In this section are some representative articles on n-words—a few general works and more specialized ones categorized by language family. The citations are highly selective; for more exhaustive readings, see the Oxford Bibliographies Online article Negation. For additional dissertations, see the section PhD Dissertations).

Overview Papers on N-words

Comprehensive overview pieces are Giannakidou 2006, which discusses data from a wide range of languages, and Corblin, et al. 2004, whose scope is more limited to French and Romance languages. Ladusaw 1992 is also important, because it is the first work that suggested making NC part of the discussion of negative polarity.

Corblin, Francis, Viviane Déprez, Henriëtte de Swart, and Lucia Tovena. 2004. Negative concord. In Handbook of French semantics. Edited by Francis Corblin and Henriëtte de Swart, 417–455. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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This is a discussion of NC mainly in French, but contrastive data are also included.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2006. N-words and negative concord. In The Blackwell companion to syntax. Vol. 3. Edited by Martin Everaert, 327–391. Oxford: Blackwell.
DOI: 10.1002/9780470996591 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Giannakidou presents the main typological patterns and questions surrounding n-words and negative concord with data from Romance languages, Slavic, Greek, and Hungarian. N-words in these languages are contrasted with n-words in Germanic. A number of diagnostics is summarized for negative, indefinite, and universal n-words.
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Ladusaw, William A. 1992. Expressing negation. In SALT II: Proceedings from the Second Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory. Edited by Chris Barker and David R. Dowty, 237–259. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Ladusaw suggests embedding the study of n-words into the study of negative polarity and looks mainly at Romance data from Raffaella Zanuttini’s 1991 PhD dissertation (Zanuttini 1991, cited under Negation and Negative Concord).
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Greek N-Words

Giannakidou 2000 is a representative work; see earlier discussions in Giannakidou 1997, chapter 4. Giannakidou 1997 argues that n-words are uniformly indefinites, a position that has been revised in later works.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1997. The landscape of polarity items. PhD diss., Univ. of Groningen.
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Presents an analysis of Greek n-words (in both emphatic and nonemphatic variants) as being indefinites.
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Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2000. Negative . . . concord? Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18:457–523.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1006477315705 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A quantificational analysis of n-words is proposed by treating the n-word as a universal quantifier that scopes above negation. This is the first record of such an analysis.
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Hungarian N-Words

Representative works on Hungarian n-words are Puskás 1998, Tóth 1999, and Surányi 2006.

Puskás, Genoveva. 1998. On the neg-criterion in Hungarian. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 45:167–213.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009613125594 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is among the first applications of the neg-criterion approach to Hungarian.
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Surányi, Balázs. 2006. Quantification and focus in negative concord. Lingua 116:272–313.
DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2004.08.007 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Surányi distinguishes two cases of negative dependencies in Hungarian, one of which involves scoping of a universal above negation, as in Greek.
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Tóth, Ildikó. 1999. Negative polarity licensing in Hungarian. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 46:119–142.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009681909512 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Two types of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hungarian are distinguished. Locality as well as semantic restrictions are discussed.
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Romance N-words

Much of the work on negative concord started with work on Romance languages, in particular Italian (as in the classic works Zanuttini 1991, cited under Negation and Negative Concord, and Haegeman and Zanuttini 1991). The neg-criterion approach, which has been very influential, analyzes n-words as negative quantifiers, subject to agreement with the neg head. Other works parameterize the negativity (Déprez 2000, Déprez and Martineau 2004) or propose polyadic quantifiers (de Swart and Sag 2002). See also Herburger 2001 for Spanish and Vallduví 1994 for Catalan and Spanish.

Déprez, Viviane. 2000. Parallel (a)symmetries and the structure of negative expressions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18.2: 253–342.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1006449808181 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper discusses the constraint on the distribution of n-words in a variety of Romance languages. The claim is that parametric options in DP syntax have consequences on the semantic nature of these expressions and thereby on their distribution.
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Déprez, Viviane, and F. Martineau. 2004. Micro-parametric variation and negative concord. In Contemporary approaches to Romance linguistics. Edited by J. Auger, J. C. Clements, and B. Vance, 139–158. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 258. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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The focus is on synchronic and diachronic Standard French in relation to Quebec French and French-based Creoles.
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de Swart, Henriëtte, and Ivan Sag. 2002. Negation and negative concord in Romance. Linguistics and Philosophy 25:373–417.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1020823106639 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
French n-words are analyzed as polyadic quantifiers. All negative quantifiers are collected into an n-store and are interpreted by means of iteration (double negation) or resumption (negative concord) upon retrieval.
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Haegeman, Liliane, and Raffaella Zanuttini. 1991. Negative heads and the neg-criterion. Linguistic Review 8:233–251.
DOI: 10.1515/tlir.1991.8.2-4.233 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a standard citation for the neg-criterion. The data are from Italian and West Flemish.
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Herburger, Elena. 2001. The negative concord puzzle revisited. Natural Language Semantics 9:289–333.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1014205526722 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper is about Spanish n-words.
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Vallduví, Enric. 1994. Polarity items, n-words, and minimizers in Catalan and Spanish. Probus 6:263–294.
DOI: 10.1515/prbs.1994.6.2-3.263 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A standard citation for NPIs and n-words in Catalan and Spanish.
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Polish N-words

Important works are Przepiórkowski and Kupc 1998, Richter and Sailer 1999—both in the framework of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)—and Błaszczak 2001.

Błaszczak, Joanna. 2001. Investigation into the interaction between the indefinites and negation. Studia Grammatica 51. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
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This is a study of indefinites, polarity, and negative concord with special reference to Polish and other Slavic languages and to Germanic, mostly discussing syntactic issues.
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Przepiórkowski, Adam, and Anna Kupc. 1998. Eventuality negation and negative concord in Polish and Italian. In Slavic in head-driven phrase structure grammar. Edited by Robert D. Borsley and Adam Przepiórkowski, 211–246. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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An HPSG analysis with interesting ideas about the role of negation.
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Richter, Frank, and Manfred Sailer. 1999. LF constraints on expressions of Ty2: An HPSG analysis of negative concord in Polish. In Slavic in head-driven phrase structure grammar. Edited by Robert D. Borsley and Adam Przepiórkowski, 247–282. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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An HPSG analysis of Polish n-words.
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West Flemish, Germanic Languages

Liliane Haegeman’s study of negation in West Flemish (Haegeman and Zanuttini 1996) has been instrumental for understanding negative concord as agreement. Hoeksema 1997 presents historical data from Middle Dutch. For more recent discussions, see Zeijlstra 2004 and Haegeman and Lohndal 2010, which engage in a debate about agreement.

Haegeman, Liliane, and Terje Lohndal. 2010. Negative concord and multiple agree: A case study of West Flemish. Linguistic Inquiry 41.2: 181–211.
DOI: 10.1162/ling.2010.41.2.181 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is an important study that argues against the multiple agree analysis of negative concord.
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Haegeman, Liliane, and Raffaella Zanuttini. 1996. Negative concord in West Flemish. In Parameters and functional heads: Essays in comparative syntax. Edited by Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi, 117–179. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Instrumental piece for the agreement analysis of negative concord.
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Hoeksema, Jacob. 1997. Negative concord in Middle Dutch. In Negation and polarity: Syntax and semantics. Edited by Danielle Forget, Paul Hirschbühler, France Martineau, and María Luisa Rivero, 139–157. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Hoeksema draws on Middle Dutch corpora.
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Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2004. Sentential negation and negative concord. PhD diss., Univ. of Amsterdam.
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This is a broad typological study of negative concord building on the theory of agreement.
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Korean

A relevant paper is Sells 2006.

Sells, Peter. 2006. Interactions of negative polarity items in Korean. In Proceedings of the 11th Harvard International Symposium on Korean Linguistics. Edited by S. Kuno, I.-H. Lee, J. Whitman, J. Maling, Y.-S. Kang, P. Sells, and H.-S. Sohn, 724–737. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Dept. of Linguistics
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Sells claims that Korean n-words are licensed above negation, though he still tries to maintain an indefinite analysis.
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Japanese

Watanabe 2004 questions the universal analysis for Japanese n-words and offers a syntactic analysis of these as relying on focus.

Watanabe, Akira. 2004. The genesis of negative concord: Syntax and morphology of negative doubling. Linguistic Inquiry 35:559–612.
DOI: 10.1162/0024389042350497 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper is about Japanese n-words (wh-indeterminates with -mo) and argues that they are licensed as focus.
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