In the past thirty years, Frans Zwarts has written several papers providing crucial insight in licensing contexts for Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), presenting a more nuanced picture than Ladusaw... Show moreIn the past thirty years, Frans Zwarts has written several papers providing crucial insight in licensing contexts for Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), presenting a more nuanced picture than Ladusaw’s (1979) downward entailing (DE) requirement. Zwarts demonstrated (1981) that a number of Dutch NPIs appear only in a subset of DE-contexts, and proposed (1995) non-veridicality as a logico-semantic property that licenses so-called superweak NPIs. Such superweak NPIs, however, have hardly been attested. We show that Mandarin shenme (‘a (thing)’) is a prototypical superweak NPI. We explain its ungrammaticality in veridical contexts by arguing that shenme exhibits a lexical referential deficiency. Acquisitional data, furthermore, suggest that children initially analyze shenme as a WH-quantifier but acquire the referential deficiency underlying its NPI status after the age of four. Show less
In the past thirty years, Frans Zwarts has written several papers providing crucial insight in licensing contexts for Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), presenting a more nuanced picture than Ladusaw... Show moreIn the past thirty years, Frans Zwarts has written several papers providing crucial insight in licensing contexts for Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), presenting a more nuanced picture than Ladusaw’s (1979) downward entailing (DE) requirement. Zwarts demonstrated (1981) that a number of Dutch NPIs appear only in a subset of DE-contexts, and proposed (1995) non-veridicality as a logico-semantic property that licenses so-called superweak NPIs. Such superweak NPIs, however, have hardly been attested. We show that Mandarin shenme (‘a (thing)’) is a prototypical superweak NPI. We explain its ungrammaticality in veridical contexts by arguing that shenme exhibits a lexical referential deficiency. Acquisitional data, furthermore, suggest that children initially analyze shenme as a WH-quantifier but acquire the referential deficiency underlying its NPI status after the age of four. Show less
