Ahmet Naim Çiçekler, Ayşe Büşra Yakut Kubaş

Keywords: Negative polarity items, negation, downward entailing, semantics, licensing environments

Abstract

A Negative Polarity Item (NPI) is a widely attested linguistic object that is canonically licensed in negative environments. In addition to classical negative contexts, NPIs are also attested within questions and protasis of conditionals. Turkish NPIs have been the subject matter of a number of limited corpus-based studies and the following licensing environments have been noted: (i) negative-marked clauses (ii) yes-no questions and (iii) protasis of conditionals. The aim of this study is to review the related literature on semantic conditions on NPI licensing phenomenon by summarizing the studies based on English (Klima, Ladusaw, Zwarts and Giannakidou) and the studies on Turkish (ZidaniEroğlu, Aygen-Tosun, Besler, Kelepir and Görgülü), and thus we try to draw a coherent characterization of the potential NPI triggers across languages and also within the same language.