Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
NPI Licensing through the implicature — Exploring Hoeksema’s recent Dictionary of NPIs
- Date
- Thursday 19 November 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.18
Abstract
Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are only well-formed if they are licensed by the presence of a so-called negative trigger, usually a negation or a weak negation. For example, any in English is grammatical in the scope of the n-word nobody, but if we replace nobody with John, the wellformedness disappears: Nobody/*John had any idea.
The so-called triggers or licensers such as nobody make the context either downward entailing (Ladusaw 1979, Hoeksema 1983) or non-veridical (Giannakidou 1997), in other words, it is the logical properties that influence the grammatical occurrence of NPIs (Zwarts 1981).
Many utterances have, in addition to what they state, i.e., their assertion (A), also a non-assertive part, a presupposition (P) or an implicature (I) (Horn 1969). In such a combination of an assertion and a non-assertive semantic component, the licensing of an NPI can proceed via the assertion itself but also via the implicature (Baker 1970) and in exceptional cases also via the presupposition (Linebarger 1980).
I am surprised that he ate anything. (Linebarger 1980:8)
(I: I expected that he would not eat anything)
In this talk we will explore Hoeksema’s recent dictionary of negative polarity items in Dutch on some instances of seemingly unlicensed NPIs (Hoeksema’s positive cases) and will find out that for most if not all of these exceptions the licensing runs via the implicature rather than by the proposition itself. Intriguingly, in most of these cases, the Dutch word nog (‘still’, ‘yet’, …) is present in the sentence, and we will analyse nog, on a par with noch ‘and not’ as a negative coordinator, coordinating proposition and implicature (at some level of representation).