Negative polarity items in Ewe

Chris Collins, Paul M. Postal, Elvis Yevudey

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Collins & Postal (2014) argue that English NPIs have two distinct syntactic structures: a unary NEG structure and a binary NEG structure. They suggest that this distinction is generally valid for natural languages. This formal difference was taken to reconstruct the common distinction in NPI studies between strong and weak NPIs. The present analysis of Ewe NPIs seeks to provide cross-linguistic support for this dual conception of NPIs by showing that the ke-NPIs in this language are all properly analyzed exclusively as unary NEG structures.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)331-365
JournalJournal of Applied Linguistics
Volume54
Issue number2
Early online date4 May 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2018

Bibliographical note

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Keywords

  • bipartite negation
  • events
  • Ewe
  • negative polarity items
  • weak and strong NPIs

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