B05: Negative Polarity Items in Non-Negative Contexts
Project B05 focuses on understanding how negation functions in different linguistic contexts. By investigating negative polarity items in non-negative contexts, we aim to contribute significant insights into the broader field of linguistic negation.
This project seeks to reconcile traditional assumptions about the licensing of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) with observed exceptions, focusing specifically on English, German, and Romanian. We hypothesize that weak NPIs require at least a weak licenser in the at-issue meaning, while strong NPIs demand a strong licenser, which can appear in either the at-issue or non-at-issue content. Our empirical approach integrates both quantitative and qualitative data analyses, including acceptability judgments. Ultimately, the project aims to develop an empirically grounded theory of NPI licensing within a constraint-based grammar framework.
Project description on the official CRC page:
Project B05: Negative Polarity Items in Non-Negative Contexts
The complete project proposal:
Meet the Team
Pascal Hohmann
Doctoral student
Nicolas Lamoure
Frank Richter
Manfred Sailer
Dirk Buschbom
Former Research Associate
Cooperation Partners
- Verginica Barbu Mititelu (Bucharest)
- Dirk Buschbom (Wien)
- Mihaela Cristescu (Bucharest)
- Gianina Iordăchioaia (Graz)
- E. David Martínez García (Nikosia)
- Monica-Mihaela Rizea (Bucharest)
Events
Upcoming Events
May 4, 2026: Manfred Sailer, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Mihaela Cristescu, Pascal Hohmann, Nicolas Lamoure: Neg words in non-negative contexts. Talk in the IEAS colloquium "Syntax and Semantics."
Past Events
April 28, 2026: Pascal Hohmann, Dirk Buschbom, Nicolas Lamoure, Frank Richter & Manfred Sailer: Before What Happens? NPIs and Expletive Negation in bevor-Clauses. Poster at the CRC 1629 Retreat, 27.-28.4.2026, Schmitten im Taunus
April 21, 2026: Pascal Hohmann, Nicolas Lamoure, Frank Richter, Manfred Sailer: "Alles andere als" negation: The NPI-Bank as a research tool. CRC research colloquium
March 11, 2026: Frank Richter: What are Negative Polarity Items? Graz, Austria
February 26, 2026: Manfred Sailer: The NPI that licensed itself – and other observations from corpus profiles. Invited talk at the workshop "Approaches to NPIs and Their Licensing Conditions – Anything New?" (DGfS 2026 Workshop).
December 12, 2025: 3rd cooperation meeting with Gianina Iordăchioaia (Graz)
December 2, 2025: Dirk Buschbom, Pascal Hohmann, Nicolas Lamoure, Frank Richter, Manfred Sailer: NPI Bank: A dockerized research database for scalable and accessible data sharing. Poster at the CRC Workshop
November 13: Tommaso Mattiuzzi, Manfred Sailer, Cecilia Poletto, Nicolas Lamoure: Emphatic negation and discourse disalignment. Talk at CSSP, Paris
September 2-3, 2025: Manfred Sailer: A phrasal construction for an ex quōlibet falsum inference. Talk at the 32nd International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG 2025), Lisbon
July 27-August 14, 2025: Manfred Sailer: Research trip to Bucarest, Romania
April 25, 2025: Manfred Sailer: Welchen Teil von ,,Nein'' verstehen wir (noch) nicht?. (in German) Part of the science communication series Die Sprachen Bästenhardts, Mössingen, Germany
March 1-9, 2025: Manfred Sailer: Research trip to Sibiu, Romania
February 14, 2025: Manfred Sailer: Welchen Teil von ,,Nein'' verstehen wir (noch) nicht? Aktuelles aus der linguistischen Negationsforschung. (in German) Part of the science communication series Gomadinger Gespräche 2024/25, Gomadingen
December 17 & 18, 2024: Nicolas Lamoure, E. David Martínez García, Frank Richter, Monica-Mihaela Rizea, Manfred Sailer: "Einen Scheiß muss ich!" - Implicit and expressive negators in German, Romanian, and Spanish. Presentation at the CRC Workshop
December 13, 2024: 2nd cooperation meeting with Gianina Iordăchioaia (Graz)
November 29, 2024: Manfred Sailer: Co-occurrence with negation and types of NPI-hood. Online presentation, Nicosia, Cyprus
August 6, 2024: Cooperation meeting with Gianina Iordăchioaia (Graz)
July 9-10, 2024: Manfred Sailer: Horn clauses and strict NPIs under negated matrix clause. Paper at the 31st International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG 2024), Olomouc
July-September, 2024: Research visit of Jong-Bok Kim (Seoul) as a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
July 1-3, 2024: Research visit of E. David García Martínez (Nicosia)
June 24-26, 2024: Research visit of Jack Hoeksema (Groningen)
June 20-21, 2024: Manfred Sailer: Negation-transparent matrix predicates: Licensing of embedded NPIs. Poster at the MECORE Closing Workshop, Konstanz
Download: slides
May-June, 2024: Research visit of Gerald Penn (Toronto)
May 13, 2024: Frank Niu (Toronto): Dissecting Language Models: From Black Boxes to Interpretable AI. Guest lecture
Time: 10.15-11.45am (UTC+2)
Room: IG 1.418
Download: abstract
April 19, 2024: Nicolas Lamoure, Frank Richter & Manfred Sailer. Negative polarity items with coffee stain distribution. Presentation at the NegLab kick-off workshop
February 2024: The project is hiring a doctoral student!
Find our job ad on LinguistList and on the English Linguistics blog.
Publications
Sailer, Manfred. to appear. A phrasal construction of an ex quolibet falsum inference. In: Stefan Müller (ed): Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Frankfurt/Main: University Library.
Buschbom, Dirk, Pascal Hohmann, Nicolas Lamoure, Frank Richter & Manfred Sailer. 2025. NPI Bank (DB 20251031_001 v1.0.0, GUI v1.1.0). SFB 1629 Negation in Language and Beyond (NegLaB). (https://npibank.neglab.de)
Sailer, Manfred. 2025. Articles in Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Turgay & Th. Ede Zimmermann (eds): Semantik und Pragmatik. Wörterbücher für Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) 10. Berlin: de Gruyter Brill.
- Negative Polaritätselemente
- Idiome
- Inverser Skopus
Sailer, Manfred. 2025. Just a peep on a green twig: Negation affinity and NPI-hood. In: Eva Csipak, Johanna David and Mingya Liu (eds): A Festschrift in Honour of Regine Eckardt 198-207. Berlin: Humboldt University. (doi:10.18452/33390)
Sailer, Manfred. 2024. Horn clauses and strict NPIs under negated matrix clauses. In: Stefan Müller & Rui Chaves (eds): Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar . Frankfurt/Main: University Library. 152–172. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2024.10) (https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/958)