Focused NPIs in statements and questions. Jeong, S. & Roelofsen, F. Journal of Semantics, 40(1):1–68, Oxford University Press, 2023. ![Focused NPIs in statements and questions [pdf]](https://bibbase.org/img/filetypes/pdf.svg "pdf")
Paper abstract bibtex Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) with emphatic prosody such as ANY or EVER, and minimizers such as lift a finger or sleep a wink are known to generate particular contextual inferences that are absent in the case of non-emphatic NPIs such as unstressed any or ever. It remains an open question, however, what the exact status of these inferences is and how they come about. In this paper, we analyze these cases as NPIs bearing focus, and examine the interaction between focus semantics and the lexical semantics of NPIs across statements and questions.
@article{jeong2023focused,
title={Focused NPIs in statements and questions},
author={Jeong, Sunwoo and Roelofsen, Floris},
journal={Journal of Semantics},
volume={40},
number={1},
pages={1--68},
year={2023},
publisher={Oxford University Press},
url = {https://academic.oup.com/jos/article-pdf/40/1/1/50326592/ffac014.pdf},
abstract = {Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) with emphatic prosody such as ANY or EVER, and
minimizers such as lift a finger or sleep a wink are known to generate particular
contextual inferences that are absent in the case of non-emphatic NPIs such as
unstressed any or ever. It remains an open question, however, what the exact status
of these inferences is and how they come about. In this paper, we analyze these
cases as NPIs bearing focus, and examine the interaction between focus semantics
and the lexical semantics of NPIs across statements and questions.}
}