Establishing the limits between polarity sensitivity, negative polarity and negative concord

2.1 Basque indefinites in comparison to PSIs in other languages

Basque has a series of indefinites that are morphologically built on wh-words to which the prefix e- is added (Etxepare 2003; Euskaltzaindia 1993; Laka 1990; Michelena 1985; de Rijk 2008). This prefix e- is presumably related to the negative marker ez, becoming i- by dissimilation. I-indefinites, as we will call them hereafter, are illustrated in (17).^[7] Note however, that diachronically, there is no historical evidence that this Basque series of indefinites had ever had negative force by themselves, that is, they never occurred, for example, as fragment answers (possibly until the 21st century, see Section 3.2).

Syntactically, note first that i-indefinites are unable to negate a sentence by themselves (18). In order for the sentence to be interpreted as negative and be grammatical, they must co-occur with the sentential negative marker ez ‘not’, which can licence several i-indefinites at a time; see (19).

Basque

Notice that these examples show that Basque i-indefinites are licenced by an anti-morphic operator. I-indefinites are also licenced in other non-veridical contexts and hence qualify as polarity elements that can appear in the most external circle in Figure 1. See Etxepare (2003: 547–549) for a list of environments that licence i-indefinites in Basque.

Second, Basque i-indefinites have been claimed to be ill-formed when used as fragment answers in the absence of the negative marker; see (20), in opposition to what happens with NCIs as we have seen in examples (7)–(8) from Spanish and Greek respectively.

Third, i-indefinites cannot yield DN readings; see (21). This is strongly supported by experimental research in Etxeberria et al. (2018), who show that single negation (SN) is the native speakers’ preferred interpretation for sentences such as (21), with two i-indefinites and the sentential negative marker.^[9]

In addition, Etxeberria et al. (2022) have shown experimentally that Basque i-indefinites never give rise to a negative interpretation in the absence of an overt negative marker; see (22), which is a property of NCIs, as illustrated in the Spanish negative spread construction in (23).

Spanish

When asked to evaluate the acceptability of declarative sentences containing one or more i-indefinites but no sentential negative marker (see (22) above), Basque speakers predictably assigned low acceptability scores to those sentences, thus showing that i-indefinites are semantically dependent expressions. Furthermore, when the same speakers had to attribute an interpretation to the sentences that had been rated low in the acceptability task by means of a picture-selection task, they consistently chose an existential reading rather than a negative one.

To sum up, Basque i-indefinites (i) cannot negate a sentence by themselves, (ii) can be licenced in a wide range of polarity contexts (beyond downward entailing, anti-additive, and anti-morphic ones), (iii) cannot be used in isolation as fragment answers, (iv) cannot yield DN, and (v) are associated with an existential reading when used in subject and object position of affirmative declarative sentences without the negative marker ez ‘not’. All these properties confirm that Basque i-indefinites are PSIs. This contrasts with what has been claimed in the literature, i.e. that Basque features Strict NC (Etxepare 2003; Etxeberria et al. 2018), and that Basque i-indefinites are NPIs (Laka 1990), which Etxeberria et al. (2022) clearly show not to be the case. In fact, Laka’s (1990) definition of NPI includes the elements that we dub PSIs and NPIs. However, we argue that cross-linguistically NPIs constitute a reduced and idiomatic subset of PSIs.

In what follows, Basque i-indefinites are compared to what have been dubbed as PSIs in other languages, and as NCIs in Strict NC languages. The aim is not only to empirically motivate the position of Basque i-indefinites within the polarity landscape, but also to identify the set of properties that clearly define PSIs as well as the limits between NPol and NC more generally in the languages studied. We address this latter question in Section 3.

Hindi PSIs (e.g. ek bhii ‘any, even one’, Lahiri 1998: 58) are syntactically similar to Basque i-indefinites. First, Hindi PSIs must also co-occur with a clause-mate negative marker for a declarative sentence to be interpreted as negative (and be grammatical), as shown in the example in (24). The examples in (24b,c) show on the one hand that koi bhii ‘any’ is licenced in pre-negative position and that Hindi has a pre-/post-negative symmetry as a characteristic property, exactly as has been shown to be the case for Basque i-indefinites in (18b,c).

Hindi

Second, as can be seen in (25), the negative marker nahiiN can also licence multiple PSIs in the same clause, as was the case for Basque, see example (19). However, no DN readings are possible for these sentences.

Third, like in Basque, Hindi PSIs are grammatical in a wide range of contexts, beyond anti-morphic ones: they are allowed in the restriction of universal quantifiers, as in (26) – a characteristic anti-additive context – as well as in yes-no questions, as in (27), among other downward entailing and non-veridical contexts.

Fourth, Hindi PSIs cannot occur as fragment answers without the presence of an overt negative marker, (28Ab).

Thus, Basque i-indefinites and Hindi PSIs show a very similar distribution. They appear in a similar range of contexts (both negative and non-negative), and they display remarkable parallelisms in negative contexts: (i) they must co-occur with the overt negative marker in declarative negative clauses and when used as fragment answers (i.e. they cannot be used as fragment answers by themselves), (ii) they can occur both in pre-negative and in post-negative position, and are therefore allowed in subject position, and (iii) they do not give rise to DN readings. All in all, the parallel between Basque and Hindi suggests that so-called PSIs have a wide distribution, licenced by a broad variety of non-veridical operators, and an existential meaning (see Etxeberria et al. 2022 for Basque). This is important in relation to the fact that these same languages have a reduced set of items, NPIs, only licenced in the context of anti-veridical operators. See Section 3.1.

If we now compare Basque i-indefinites to English any-PSIs, we notice that they also show similar behaviour in negative contexts (except in subject position, where any-PSIs are excluded). As shown in (29), English any-PSIs must occur with clause-mate negation, either in the form of the negative marker not/-n’t (29a), or of a negative quantifier (NQ) such as nobody (29b).

Standard English

It is important to clarify at this point that despite the fact that lexical items such as nobody, nothing and the like have been referred to in the literature as NQs (Quirk et al. 1973), we here assume them to be the combination of an incorporated negation and an existential indefinite (Iatridou and Sichel 2011; Jacobs 1980; Klima 1964; Ladusaw 1992; Penka 2011; Penka and Zeijlstra 2010; Sauerland 2000; Temmerman 2012, among others) following a long-standing tradition that started in the mid-1960s. Within this view, English NQs, for instance, contain a negative operator not, which enters the derivation as an independent lexical item and syntactically merges with a PSI. Thanks to a morphological operation of Fusion (Temmerman 2012), the negative operator and the PSI become a single lexical item, i.e. an NQ. NQs, therefore, are considered complex syntactic objects that are derivationally formed and morphologically complex counterparts of PSIs under the immediate local domain of a(n incorporated) negative marker. Notice that, under this view, NQs are a subset of PSIs with an incorporated negative marker.

Since Basque (like Hindi) does not have lexical items comparable to English NQs, i-indefinites can only be licenced in negative declarative sentences by the overt presence of the clause-mate negative marker ez in full clauses, as already observed. That is, the Basque paradigm for (29) includes a counterpart of (29a) but not of (29b).

Beyond anti-morphic contexts, Basque i-indefinites share with English any-PSIs the possibility of being licenced in a broader set of contexts: in the scope of a negative quantificational adverb, in the scope of an affective predicate, or in the protasis of conditionals, as shown in (30)–(32).

Basque i-indefinites also show similarities with English any-PSIs in another syntactic context, namely that of fragment answers. As shown in (33A), English any-PSIs cannot be used as fragment answers, although their acceptability improves when they co-occur with an overt negative marker, (33b). Note that Basque i-indefinites are fully grammatical in a context such as (33Ab). Clearly though, in English the use of an NQ (as in (33Ac)) is preferred over the use of a negated any-PSI (as in (33Ab)).

English any-PSIs, just like Basque i-indefinites, cannot induce DN readings, as in (34).

Crucially, unlike Basque i-indefinites and Hindi PSIs, which can surface higher than the licencing negative marker (e.g. in the subject position, see (18c), (19) for Basque and (24b), (25) for Hindi), English any-PSIs are excluded from surfacing higher than their negative licensor; as in (35).

This is the case, we argue, because in English only NQs and, to a lesser extent, constituent-negated PSIs are grammatical in the subject position.^[13] Since Basque lacks a class of lexical items that is equivalent to the NQ in (36a) or the constituent-negated PSI in (36b) (see Etxepare and Uribe-Etxebarria 2020), this leaves the Basque equivalent of (35) as the only possible option to express what the English sentences in (36) express. The same applies to Hindi.

Thus, a clear prediction of what we are claiming in this paper is that if a given language has no NQs, it will resort to a different polarity element available in that language. In the case of Basque or Hindi, it makes use of PSIs combined with overt sentential negation, since these are the only polarity elements available in these languages. Obviously, the opposite also holds, that is, if a language possesses NQs, it will not (or very marginally) resort to PSIs to express what the sentence in (36a) expresses.^[14]

To sum up, English any-PSIs share with Basque i-indefinites and Hindi PSIs (i) the need for the presence of a negative marker in well-formed negative sentences, and the need for other licensors in non-negative contexts, (ii) the impossibility of occurring as isolated fragment answers, and (iii) the impossibility of licencing DN readings. However, Basque i-indefinites and Hindi PSIs differ from English any-PSIs in that the latter cannot occur in subject position and do not show a pre-/post-negative symmetry, a fact that must be linked to the existence of a series of NQs in English, but not in Basque and Hindi. This leads to the conclusion that, language internally, the polarity landscape of PSIs depends crucially on the distribution and meaning of the set of items that constitute this class.

2.2 Basque indefinites in comparison to NCIs

Let us now compare Basque i-indefinites to NCIs in Strict NC languages (e.g. Romanian, Greek, Hungarian, Czech, or Russian). So-called Strict NC languages (Giannakidou 1998) are languages where NCIs (both in preverbal and postverbal position) always co-occur with what looks like a sentential negative marker in full clauses.^[15] This is illustrated in (37) for Romanian.^[16]

Romanian

Given the fact that Basque i-indefinites must always co-occur with the negative marker ez in negative full clauses, we could hypothesise that if Basque were an NC language (as suggested by Etxepare 2003; Etxeberria et al. 2018), it would have to be of the Strict kind. Yet, a number of very important differences arise when the distribution and the interpretation of Basque i-indefinites (and PSIs in general) is compared to that of NCIs in Strict NC. We consider the distributional differences in what follows, but concerning their interpretational differences it is important to note at this point that (i) Etxeberria et al. (2022) have already shown experimentally that Basque PSIs are interpreted existentially in the absence of an overt negative marker and are, hence, non-negative items; and that (ii) Espinal et al. (2023) have shown experimentally that the NCIs of Greek, Romanian and Russian (three so-called Strict NC languages) are negative indefinites whose presence in a clausal domain is enough to assign a single negation reading, (i.e. in the absence of what looks like an overt negative marker).

In this subsection we concentrate on Romanian and Greek, two languages that have been shown by the literature to possess weak NPIs (our PSIs) as well as NCIs, which enables us to dissect the relevant structural differences between PSIs, NPIs, and NCIs.

First, in Strict NC languages, NCIs and PSIs compete for lexical insertion in some contexts, namely in fragment answers and in preverbal position. In Romanian, for instance, the NCI niciun/nicio + N ‘no + N’ and the PSI vreun/vreo + N ‘any + N’ block each other. According to Farkas (2002), the PSI vre- is used under the scope of an anti-morphic negative operator (though with restrictions, compare (38a) with (38b)), in anti-additive contexts such as the complement of without, and the restriction of a universal quantifier, as well as other downward entailing contexts such as the restriction of the quantifier few, and non-veridical contexts such as questions, and conditionals.^[17] As was also the case for English PSIs, vre- cannot occur in a position higher than the negative marker nu (39).

Romanian

By contrast, NCIs must be used in most contexts with clause-mate negation (see (38b)), and can appear in subject position, (40) (compare it to the ungrammatical (39)), as well as in fragment answers; see (41).

In Greek, there is a series of PSIs (e.g. tipota ‘anything’) and a parallel emphatic series of NCIs (e.g. TIPOTA ‘n-thing’; expressed with capital letters following the convention in the literature), which distribute in different contexts (Giannakidou 1997, 1998, 1999, et seq.). While PSIs (but not NCIs) can be used in non-veridical contexts such as questions, conditionals, and the scope of intensional verbs, only NCIs can be used in fragment answers, as in (42), and in subject position, as in (43), even licencing a postverbal PSI or NCI, as in (44).

Greek

A second important difference that arises when we compare the distribution of Basque i-indefinites to that of NCIs in Strict NC languages is that, as shown in (41A) and (42A) for Romanian and Greek respectively, NCIs in Strict NC languages must occur in the absence of the negative marker when used as fragment answers to questions (e.g. *Niciun student nu, *Dhen TIPOTA). By contrast, Basque i-indefinites (as well as Hindi PSIs), must co-occur with the sentential negative marker ez when used as fragments, see (20A) (and (28A)).

In order to continue clarifying the boundary between PSIs and NCIs empirically, we can inspect more thoroughly the distribution of Greek PSIs in negative contexts in order to check whether their behaviour is consistent with that of PSIs in Basque, Hindi, and English. As was shown in (42A), the Greek PSI tipota ‘anything’ cannot be used as a fragment answer, not even when preceded by the negative marker dhen ‘not’, whereas Basque and Hindi (and English to some extent) do not allow a PSI in the absence of a licencing negative marker to serve as a negative fragment answer. Unlike in these three languages, nonetheless, Greek does allow an emphatic NCI TIPOTA as a fragment answer. Recall that Basque and Hindi do not have NCIs (unlike Greek), or NQs (unlike English). Hence, the only possible fragment answer to questions such as (42Q) in Basque and Hindi is the combination of a PSI with the negative marker as its licensor. In the case of Greek, it seems that the existence of an NCI series bans the option of using a PSI with a licencing negative marker in a fragment answer. By contrast, in English the existence of NQs simply results in these being preferred over the combination of a negative marker and a PSI.

In a similar vein, note that Romanian and Greek PSIs are also excluded from surfacing higher than their clause-mate negative licensor, as in (39) and (43a), as was the case for English, see (35). While in Greek the preverbal position is reserved for NCIs, as in (44), in English it is reserved for NQs, as in (36a). In Hindi and Basque, PSIs can surface higher than their licenser because there are no other series of items competing for insertion in negative contexts.

Finally, it should be noted that while it is possible to obtain DN (and reject) readings in some Strict NC languages such as Romanian (and Hungarian), although not Greek, in sentences with two NCIs distributed in preverbal and postverbal positions in combination with some particular prosodic contour (Fălăuş and Nicolae 2016), DN has been shown not to be possible in sentences that combine various i-indefinites with ez in Basque (Etxeberria et al. 2018, 2022; contra Etxepare 2003) and various koi bhii indefinites with a negative marker in Hindi (see Lahiri 1998).^[19] Consider the contrast between (45a), from Romanian, and (21), from Basque, and (25), from Hindi, copied here as (45b) and (45c), respectively.

Romanian

Basque

Hindi

Summing up, in Section 2, we have shown that Basque and Hindi only have PSIs (no NCIs and no NQs), and that these PSIs are allowed in all polarity contexts. Basque and Hindi PSIs differ from English any-PSIs in that the latter cannot occur in subject position and do not show a pre-/post-negative symmetry, due to the fact, we argue, that English has a series of NQs. We have also shown that Basque, Hindi, English, Greek or Romanian PSIs differ from NCIs in that only NCIs (i) can occur in isolation as fragment answers, (ii) can licence DN readings in reject contexts, and (iii) are negative indefinites (see Espinal et al. 2023; Tubau et al. 2023). By contrast, Strict NC languages such as Romanian or Greek have both PSIs and NCIs, which obviously distribute in different polarity contexts, as shown above. Thus, cross-linguistically, PSIs and NCIs differ in both their distributional as well as in their interpretational properties.

3.1 NCIs are distinct from NPIs

Here we consider data from both Strict and Non-Strict NC systems and show that they all converge in having very limited instances of NPIs, which, in addition, are always formally distinct from NCIs and with a strong tendency towards being fully or partially idiomatic. We focus first on various contrasts between NCIs and NPIs in three Strict NC languages (Czech, Russian and Modern Greek), and then we move to Non-Strict NC languages (namely Non-Standard English) and PS languages (Basque and Hindi).

Thus, let us first consider Czech. This West Slavic language has been argued to have a small class of NPIs, distinct from NCIs. Dočekal (2020) discusses the distribution of ani (jeden) + N ‘even (one) N’ expressions and experimentally shows that despite having been traditionally classified as NCIs, they are actually NPIs. Ani (jeden) requires clause-mate negation in simple sentences and as such it could, in principle, be considered an NCI or a (strong) NPI.

Czech

However, whereas NPIs are accepted in the embedded clauses of Neg-raising predicates, (47), NCIs are not, (48), confirming that ani (jeden) and nikdo have a different status.

Further evidence for the NPI status of ani (jeden) is found in Dočekal and Dotlačil (2016, 2017, where the acceptability of ani (jeden) is tested in fragment answers. Ani (jeden) is not grammatical as a fragment answer while NCIs (e.g. žádný) are judged as natural by native speakers.

Interestingly, note that ani (jeden) does not function as a PSI in the sense that it cannot occur in non-veridical contexts such as questions or protasis of conditionals.^[20]

Let us now consider Russian, an East Slavic language that contains a series of indefinites formed by adding the prefix ni- to interrogative pronouns (e.g. nikto ‘n-body’, ničto ‘n-thing’, nigde ‘n-where’, etc.) and that is characterised in the literature as showing NC. The distribution of these lexical items is the one expected from NCIs in Strict NC languages (see Garzonio 2019; Gerasimova 2019; Tsurska 2010). As shown in (51), they are required to co-occur with what looks like the negative marker ne ‘not’ when postverbal, as in (51a), and when preverbal, as in (51b), but not when used as fragments, as in (52), a context where NCIs occur without an overt sentential negative marker cross-linguistically.^[21]

Russian

By contrast, Russian has a series of indefinites formed with the interrogative pronouns (kto ‘who’, čto ‘what’, gde ‘where’, etc.) and the affixes -libo, -to or -nibud’^[22] that are used in non-veridical contexts such as questions and conditionals (see (53) and (54)) and, thus, do not qualify as NPIs.^[23]

In addition, as expected, NCIs in Russian cannot occur in questions and conditionals.

Russian, nonetheless, has at least two items that qualify as NPIs: these are the lexical item dolgo ‘for a long time’ and the genitive subject. As can be seen in (57), dolgo requires a clause-mate negation (i.e. an anti-veridical operator). Example (58) shows that the genitive subject of a negative clause contrasts with the nominative subject of a non-negative clause. Hence, it seems that the grammaticality of genitive subjects depends on the obligatory presence of a clause-mate negation.

Modern Greek is another Strict NC language where NC co-occurs with a few instances of NPol. As mentioned above, Modern Greek NCIs (e.g. TIPOTA ‘n-thing’, KANENAS ‘n-person’, etc.) co-occur with a clause-mate negation both in postverbal and in preverbal position, and can be used as fragment answers in the absence of an overt negation (see Section 2.2). Their non-emphatic counterparts, by contrast (e.g. tipota ‘anything’, kanenas ‘anybody’) have the distribution of PSIs: they are grammatical in non-veridical contexts (including negative sentences), but cannot serve as fragments. Beyond emphatic NCIs and non-emphatic PSIs, idiomatic expressions such as trexi kastano lit. ‘runs chestnut’, as in (59), ute lexi ‘not even word’, (60), and the prefix poli- ‘much’, (61), are only grammatical in anti-veridical contexts and, therefore, qualify as proper NPIs (see Giannoula 2021).

Greek

Interestingly, note that poli- ‘much’ cannot occur in non-veridical contexts such as questions or protasis of conditionals, hence it does not function as a PSI.

If we now turn to Non-Strict NC languages, namely Non-Standard English, it should be noted that lexical items such as nothing participate in an NC relationship with -n’t in (63a) and nobody and nothing appear in a negative spread structure in (63b), hence, they should be considered NCIs in these contexts. In addition, some few lexical items exist that differ morphologically from NCIs and that should be considered NPIs (e.g. either), since they are restricted to occurring with anti-morphic and anti-additive operators, as in (64a,b), but are ungrammatical with other downward entailing and non-veridical operators, as in (64c,d).

Non-Standard English

Finally, PS languages, that is, languages which – as we argue – do not have NCIs, but only PSIs, such as Basque and Hindi, also have a very small set of NPIs. In Hindi, for instance, there seems to be at least one NPI. As shown in (65), gayaa is an inabilitative modal that requires negation to be licenced. This modal cannot be licenced in other non-veridical contexts, as in (66), except for questions, but only when a negative answer is expected.^[24]

Hindi

In a similar vein, in Basque, which is also a language without NC (see Etxeberria et al. 2022), certain lexical items exist that do not have a meaning of their own (txint, tut, zipitz) and that need to always appear in negative contexts (see Etxeberria 2014, 2021; Etxepare 2003; de Rijk 1972, 1996).

Basque

In short, in this section we have shown that NC languages (both Strict and Non-Strict), as well as PS languages, have few cases of NPol. One could interpret these data by hypothesising that NC is a subtype of NPol. Yet, the discussed data are also compatible with the view that NC and NPol are independent phenomena. In fact, in support of this latter view we have shown that in a number of languages NCIs, which derive from indefinite PSIs, are morphologically and distributionally distinct from NPIs, and that the class of NPIs includes a remarkably small number of items, which are most often idiomatic.

In order to evaluate the claim that NC could be a subtype of NPol, in the next subsection we consider the diachronic evolution of some NCIs in a Non-Strict NC language and show that they do not evolve from NPIs. This points towards the conclusion that the two phenomena, NC and NPol, are different but compatible with each other rather than towards the conclusion that the two phenomena exist in a subset relation.

3.2 NCIs derive from PSIs, not from NPIs

In this section we focus on diachronic changes that have affected nominal and indefinite expressions with a special reference to a Non-Strict NC language, namely French. Previous studies coincide on the claim that in the evolution from Latin to Modern French some expressions became less negative over time (e.g. nient, nuns, nesun), while others became more negative (e.g. nului, personne, rien, aucun). According to Labelle and Espinal (2014) these historical changes depend on the gain or loss of a formal feature by these expressions, and they postulate two fundamental processes: (i) a semantic change (by which an expression acquires or loses a semantic feature that is a requirement for its interpretation as a PSI); (ii) a morphosyntactic change (by which an expression acquires or loses a syntactic feature that makes it syntactically dependent on a checking relationship). (See also Gianollo 2018; Herburger in press.)

This analysis predicts that, on the one hand, both indefinite and nominal expressions can become more negative over time. Thus, in the case of personne and rien the polar variant started to diverge from the plain nominal variant already in the 12th century in the case of rien, and in the 16th century in the case of personne (Labelle and Espinal 2014: 221). What is crucial for the topic of the present section is the evolution from original nouns to PSIs and later to NCIs, and likewise for backward evolution from NCIs to PSIs (Déprez and Martineau 2004; Hansen 2013; Ingham 2011; Larrivée 2014, 2021; Larrivée and Kallel 2020).

On the other hand, these diachronic changes appear to show bidirectionality. Thus, Latin nullus underwent semantic weakening towards a PSI status and later underwent morphosyntactic change towards an NCI status. More specifically in Classical Latin nullus ‘no, none’ was an NQ, which became an NCI in Late Latin when it displayed NC. In Old French the descendant of nullus, nul, was a PSI, with an existential reading in typical non-veridical polarity contexts. Finally, in Middle French nul started to be found with a negative reading outside of polarity contexts, suggesting the emergence of an NCI status. Interestingly though, it is relevant to note that, to our knowledge, this same type of bidirectionality has not been described for NPIs, most probably due to their characteristic idiomatic status and marked distribution.

In addition, in Basque there seems to be a change in progress when it comes to the distribution of i-indefinites in fragment answers that is of particular interest to what we are arguing in this paper. Recall from Section 3.1 that Basque i-indefinites are ungrammatical in fragment answers (a context that is diagnostic of NC) unless an overt negative marker is present in the sentence, as in (68)/(20).

Basque

However, in contrast to the ungrammaticality of (68Ab), young generations of Basque speakers appear to be using i-indefinites as fragment answers without the need for the presence of the sentential negative marker. In order to empirically support the observation that younger generations show a tendency to accept Basque PSIs as fragment answers we have conducted an informal acceptability judgement test with two groups of speakers: 45 participants of 38–51 years of age (Group 1), and 46 participants of 14–18 years of age (Group 2).

We prepared two Google Forms questionnaires with four question/answer pairs that consisted of a question and a fragment answer with a Basque i-indefinite (different in each answer, inor ‘anybody’, ezer ‘anything’, inon ‘anywhere’, and inoiz ‘anytime’) with no sentential negative marker and a continuation sentence that forced the participants to interpret the answers in a negative way, that is, as though these elements were NCIs.

Participants read the stimulus and they were asked to rate the acceptability of the answer provided by Ane in (69b) or (70b) by choosing among two options: “In your opinion, Ane’s response is adequate”; “In your opinion, Ane’s response is not adequate”. Each sentence was presented without a preceding context.

Speakers of Group 1 judged in 93.25 % of the cases the answer provided in the test as unacceptable while speakers of Group 2 judged the same answers as acceptable in 90.20 % of the cases. The results consistently show that younger speakers judge fragment answers such as (69) and (70), and by extension the one in (68Ab), as much more acceptable than older speakers and interpret them as negative. In other words, they interpret them as NCIs. Further research and more formal tests are needed to confirm this statement, but we would not expect to find any difference in the results.

This obviously means that younger generations are beginning to reanalyse i-indefinites from PSIs to NCIs. The crucial point here is that this is happening without i-indefinites transitioning to NPIs first. That is, those (young) speakers that accept and produce fragment answers such as the ones in (68Ab), (69), and (70) still use i-indefinites in the whole range of non-veridical contexts (e.g. questions, conditionals, etc.) that we have presented in Section 2.1, rather than restricting them to anti-veridical contexts, contexts where NPIs are accepted. This change in progress recently detected in Basque,^[25] together with what we have shown above based on Labelle and Espinal (2014), come to show that NC is not a subtype of NPol since the data show that NCIs do not derive from NPIs.

3.3 All languages with NC also have PS, but not vice versa

The claim that NC cannot be conceived as a subtype of NPol, as we have been able to conclude in the previous section, does not exclude the idea that NC may be a type of PS (and NPol a different subtype of PS). In this section we aim to show that there are languages with PS and NPol but no NC and that, at the same time, there may also be languages with PS and NC but no NPol.

Let us assess such predictions in turn. If NC is a special kind of PS, it is predicted to be the case that all NC languages will also have PSIs, while it must not be the case that all languages that have PSIs also have NCIs. It was shown in Sections 2.1 and 3.2 that Basque and Hindi are languages with PSIs and a small number of NPIs but with no NCIs, thus confirming the prediction made by the conclusions in the previous section. To the best of our knowledge, there are no languages in the world that have NCIs but no PSIs at all.

The picture that emerges, therefore, is one where PS is a general phenomenon across languages (Haspelmath 1997), with NPol and NC being possible subtypes of PS but independent phenomena from one another. This makes it possible for languages to have PS, NPol and NC as part of their grammar (e.g. Non-Standard English, Czech, Modern Greek, Catalan, and French), but also languages with PS, but no NC and very few cases of NPIs. The latter is the case of Hindi and Basque, but also Standard English, which has not been discussed so far.

Standard English is generally assumed to be a non-NC language, as NQs such as nobody and nothing introduce logical negation on their own (see de Swart 2010; Ladusaw 1992; Longobardi 2014; Puskás 2012; Zeijlstra 2004; among others). This is especially obvious when they occur in postverbal position and no overt negative marker is needed for the proposition to be negated, as in (71).

Standard English

Remember that in this paper (see Section 2.1) we are assuming that so-called NQs are complex syntactic objects that are derivationally formed and morphologically complex counterparts of PSIs under the immediate local domain of a(n incorporated) negative marker. Thus, NQs are a marked subset of PSIs. One of the predictions of the assumption that morphologically NQs are the combination of a PSI and a negative marker is that if a language has NQs, it will also have other polarity elements; in other words, no language will exist in the world that only has NQs as the only type of expression in the polarity-sensitive landscape. This appears to be the case.

Regardless of how Standard English lexical items such as nobody and nothing are analysed, what is clear is that they are not NCIs in this variety, for it is a cross-linguistic property of NCIs to require what looks like an overt negative licenser when they occur in a postverbal position, which is not the case for NQs, as in (71). Unlike NCIs, NQs encode an instance of logical negation that negates the proposition regardless of the syntactic position in which they occur.

The situation is such that Non-Standard English (see Section 3.1) differs from Standard English in having NCIs in addition to NQs, PSIs and NPIs. This suggests that assuming that NPol and NC are special types of PS makes the right predictions. Non-Standard English is a language that has NC and also has PS, while Standard English has PS but not NC.