| Popis: |
Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are characterized by a polarity-sensitive use, restricted to downward entailing (DE) environments, mostly negative environments. As a result, the input of a child learning the language will overwhelmingly involve sentences where these items co-appear with negation. While the child should be able to get the meaning of the sentence as a whole, multiple analyses are equally possible for the meaning of polarity-sensitive items themselves, and the ways they are combined in a sentence. In this study, we investigate the meaning that learners attribute to NPIs when they appear in positive contexts by using an artificial language learning methodology. We consider four different hypotheses, which correspond with the different patterns of polarity items attested in natural languages: H1. a narrow-scope (often existential) meaning (=the ‘literal’ NPI meaning); H2. a wide-scope (often universal) meaning (=the logical dual of the NPI); H3. a negative quantificational meaning (= non-strict negative concord), H4. a redundant negative meaning, analogous to Neg itself (=Jespersen’s cycle). We present two experiments where we teach English speaking participants a novel word *lom*. In Experiment 1, *lom* is a degree modifier, roughly equivalent to English ‘at all’. In Experiment 2, *lom* is a temporal adverb roughly equivalent to the English word ‘ever’. Participants are trained on sentences in which lom always occurs together with negation. At test, participants are asked to interpret sentences where the quantifier appears on its own, without negation. |
