Introductory Course on
Negative Polarity Items: Corpus Linguistics, Semantics, and Psycholinguistics

Frank Richter, Janina Rado, Manfred Sailer

ASSIGNMENT DAY 4:

For this assignment you are invited to work together with speakers of
the same language.

Task: 

Prepare a small questionnaire study.

Method: 

1) Take six NPIs from the previous assignments and use them to
construct natural-sounding sentences. Ideally the six sentences will
be reasonably similar.

2) Modify each sentence to produce two more versions: one without a
licenser (condition (b)) and one with intrusive negation (condition
(c)).  Again, all condition (c) sentences should be reasonably
similar.  Versions (a)-(c) of one sentence constitute an item.

3) For each condition type, write three more sentences *without NPIs*
that appear just as acceptable to you as the condition.  For condition
(a) you will probably want fully grammatical sentences.  For the other
two conditions you should try to find the best match.  The resulting
nine sentences are your distractors (a.k.a. fillers).

4) Create three counterbalanced lists: only one version of each item
should occur on each list, and each list should contain the same
number of items in each condition (=2).  For instance, List 1 may
include (1a), (2b), (3c), (4a), (5b), (6c). Across the lists, all
items will have to appear in all conditions.  Can you figure out what
Lists 2 and 3 should be?

5) Add all nine distractors to each list and mix up the order of the
sentences. Now you have a questionnaire.

6) Optional: ask other native speakers of the language to judge the
acceptability of the sentences.  One person should only fill out one
version of the questionnaire (one list). Different people should be
given different lists.  Ideally you'd ask multiples of three people.

What to turn in: the set of items and fillers that you constructed in
steps 2 and 3.  Include a brief explanation of how the filler types
are supposed to match the acceptability of the experimental
conditions.

If you get to try out the questionnaire, we would also like to hear
about the results!


Mail your results by Friday 11am to 

     janina@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de