<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W06-1511">
  <Title>Licensing German Negative Polarity Items in LTAG</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="81" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"/>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
1.1 Negative Polarity Items
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> NPIs are distributionally restricted to linguistic environments that exhibit a trigger for negativity (see e.g., Ladusaw, 1980; Linebarger, 1987; Zwarts, 1997). More precisely, NPIs seek to be placed within the scope of a negative operator at the level of semantics. We say that the NPI has to be licensed by an exponent of negativity, the licenser.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Examples in German can be found in (1)-(5) (the NPI is underlined while the licenser is in bold face).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2">  ('Nobody has donated any cent at all.') b.*Auch nur einen Cent hat niemand gespendet.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> We will mainly be concerned with verbal NPIs such as wahrhaben wollen ('accept to be true') and scheren ('to give a damn about'). Another group of NPIs we will pay closer attention to are minimizers, here exemplified by auch nur ein Cent ('any Cent at all'). They are quantifiers denoting the bottom line of a scale and therefore show affinity with negation due to pragmatic reasons. Furthermore, minimizers as quantifiers are subject to particular position restrictions with respect to negation (see next section). A group of NPIs we will leave aside in this paper, however, is that of adjectival NPIs such as sonderlich ('very').</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="81" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
1.2 NPI Licensers
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Various items and constructions can license NPIs.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Besides the more obvious ones such as not, nobody and never, also (among others) few, re- null strictors of universal quantifiers, conditional antecendents and questions can license at least some of the NPIs. There has been much controversy about what the characterizing logical property of licensers is. One proposal is based on the notion of downward entailment (DE, Ladusaw, 1980), which holds for operators whose truth value is persistent over specification. While the DE property can be found in most of the licensers, there are some, such as questions, where it is hard to detect (see van der Wouden, 1997 for an overview).1 In our proposal we don't make use of DE as an NPI licensing criterion. Instead we only require the negation operator (!) in the semantic representation as licensing feature. We thereby restrict ourselves to triggers of 'classic' negation; we go even further and only implement non-contrastive negation. We use this term after Jacobs (1982) where non-contrastive negation (NCN) and contrastive negation (CN) are examined for German. They differ in that sentences with CN can be extended by a but-phrase (Sondern-Phrase) while adding a but-phrase to sentences with NCN gives odd results. Put differently, CN focuses on parts of a sentence while NCN does not.2 Whether CN or NCN is available, is indicated by intonation and position of the negative element. However, ambiguous indications are possible. In our analysis, we leave aside intonation and stick to unambiguous NCN as far as possible.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="81" end_page="81" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
1.3 Semantic Scope and Range of Licensing
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> It is not sufficient for an NPI to just co-occur with a licenser in the same sentence; it has to be in the licenser's scope. Furthermore, additional constraints have been proposed in the literature.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> One of the most extensively discussed requires the NPI to be c-commanded by the licenser on surface structure (c-command constraint, Ladusaw, 1980). As Hoeksema (2000) points out, the c-command constraint is too restrictive when applied to languages with a considerably freer word order than English, e.g. Dutch and German (see (4) for an example that does not respect the c-command constraint). He also points out that the need for the c-command constraint only arises  focused by CN.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> from capturing the distribution of minimizers. All other NPIs obey a simple scope constraint in terms of Linebarger's immediate scope constraint (ISC, Linebarger, 1980; Linebarger, 1987), namely that no other propositional operators (i.e. &amp;quot;logical elements&amp;quot; that are capable of entering into scope ambiguities) may intervene between the licenser and the NPI on LF.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> While the ISC seems to hold for quantifiers, quantificational adverbs and operators that conjoin propositions such as because, there are in fact some operators that may scopally intervene.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> Among them are non-quantificational adverbs, minimizers and modals, as in (6):  ('Peter didn't need to lift a finger.') In (6), the negation always has wide scope with respect to the modal m&amp;quot;ussen (must), hence m&amp;quot;ussen intervenes between negation and NPI, but still the sentence is grammatical.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> Thus, our criterion for an NPI to be licensed is  1. to be in the scope of a negation that is semantically interpreted in the same finite clause, and 2. not to allow regular quantifiers to scopally in- null tervene between negation and NPI. In this paper, we will also refer to these criterions as immediate scope.3 Minimizers seem to add a third criterion, namely that the licenser has to syntactically c-command the minimizer.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> Independently from the ISC, one has to keep in mind that negative elements in German are able to cancel each other out, that is to constitute double negation. We will come back to this briefly in section 3.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="4" start_page="81" end_page="81" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
1.4 Neg Raising Constructions
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> We extend our analysis to so-called neg raising (NR, cf. Horn, 1978) constructions because there are interesting interactions between NPI licensing and neg raising.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> 3Note that with this approach, one negation can even license several NPIs as in (i):  The negation can either take scope at its surface position, i.e., scope over glauben, or it can scope within the embedded sentence. Hence, two interpretations are generally available: (a) !believe(p) and (b) believe(!p). The second reading is possible only with NR-verbs.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> In LTAG, lexical material is generated at its surface structure position, there is no movement outside the lexicon. Therefore it is natural to assume with respect to sentences as (7), that the negation is syntactically generated in the matrix clause and that neg raising attitude verbs such as glauben allow for semantic lowering of an attached negation. This negation then receives wide scope within the sentential complement. In this, we follow the HPSG analysis proposed in Sailer (to appear).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> The presence of an NPI in the embedded sentence as in (8) forces the negation to scope under the bridge verb, that is the (b)-interpretation is chosen.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>