Negative Polarity Items as Collocations: Experimental Evidence from German

Abstract

We present experimental findings that support the hypothesis that the licensing requirements of negative polarity items (NPIs) pattern with well-formedness conditions on frozen syntactic-semantic features of idiomatic expressions. When multiword NPIs that require a strong negation as their licenser are accompanied by a weaker type of negative licenser instead, they are perceived as degraded by native speakers the same way as violations of morphosyntactic co-occurrence requirements in the idiomatic multiword component of these NPIs. Such a violation occurs for example when a certain noun phrase in argument position is in plural form instead of singular, or when an obligatory lexical element is replaced by a synonym. Subsuming idiomatic phrases under the more general category of (not necessarily idiomatic) collocationally restricted complex expressions, we take our results as evidence for a theory of NPIs which interprets their licensing in syntactically delimited negative environments as an instance of satisfying the well-formedness constraints of a collocation that comprises a semantic restriction. The lexically variable negation component of NPIs is interpreted as an abstract semantic co-occurrence requirement of a complex collocation.