The following is a list of English NPIs classified according to the licensing aspects discussed in:

Sailer, Manfred. 2024. Horn clauses and strict NPIs under negated matrix clauses. In: Elodie Winckel & Stefan Müller (eds): Proceedings of HPSG 2024.

Explanation

Licensing aspects

Strength:

Values: strong/weak  (van der Wouden 1997)

Strong NPIs require a verbal negation or a negative indefinite as licenser, but not a weak licenser like not every or few, see (1).

(1) a. Strong: No one/*Not everyone lifted a finger to help Alex.
       b. Weak: No one/Not everyone has ever helped Alex.

Locality:

Values: strict/non-strict NPIs (Hoeksema 2017)

Non-strict NPIs can occur in complement clauses of negated factive predicates, see (2).

(2) a. Non-strict: he didn’t know [that the building had ever been used
                                     as a dry  cleaner. . . ]                     (English Trends)
      b. Strict:  *he didn’t know [that the building was all that old].

At-issueness:

Values:  regular/lexical (Sedivy 1990)

Lexical NPIs can be licensed pragmatically, for example in (3a) to reject the claim that Cynthia never lifts a finger. Regular NPIs require an overt (i.e. at-issue) licenser: at all is not licensed in (3b) even in a context where it is claimed that Bert doesn’t care about the homeless.

(3) a. Lexical:  Cynthia DOES lift a finger when there is work to be
                               done.
       b. Regular: *Bert DOES care about the homeless at all.
                                                                                                         (Sedivy 1990: 98)

List

NPI	Strength	Locality	At-issueness	Comment
all that Adj	weak	strict	lexical
any, anything, etc.	weak	non-strict	regular
at all	weak	strict	regular
either	strong	strict	regular
ever	weak	non-strict	regular
lift a finger	strong	strict	lexical
NPI need	weak	strict	regular
until	strong	strict	regular