closer to the truth? strong negative polarity items ...

CLOSER TO THE TRUTH? STRONG NEGATIVE POLARITY ITEMS BETWEEN CONTROLLED DIAGNOSTIC ENVIRONMENTS AND REAL-USE DISTRIBUTION PROFILES FROM LARGE CORPORA MONICA-MIHAELA RIZEA Solomon Marcus Center for Computational Linguistics University of Bucharest

1. Introduction This paper proposes an analysis of strong Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) from the perspective of the collocational theory (Sailer 2009 a and b), which combines theoretical reasoning and empirical methods. We first show the improvements that this approach brings in comparison with other classical theories of NPI licensing (i.e. an enhanced role of the context by acknowledging the reading-dependent effects, refined mechanisms for the classification of individual NPIs, and flexibility since it can integrate the results provided by corpus investigation/psycholinguistic experiments). Then, we propose a method for testing and classifying individual NPI candidates: briefly, we start from pre-defined models that correspond to theoretical expectations (i.e. diagnostic patterns provided by the collocational theory); in a subsequent phase, we compare the results with real-use distribution profiles from large electronic corpora; therefore, we start from core controlled NPI profiles resulted from testing in diagnostic environments; then, we obtain enriched NPI profiles from corpora in order to better capture the individual idiosyncrasies. An important characteristic of the collocational approach is that the supplementary corpus information can be further processed by the theory. In the best scenario, the model can be improved, by identifying other potential NPI classes1; both 1 Ideally, what we expect is that the deeper investigation combining the NPI profiles resulting from testing in diagnostic environments with the distribution profiles resulting from corpus analysis should reveal a. more NPI classes, b. individual variations within one class of NPIs, c. variations across languages within the same NPI class, or d. different NPI classes across languages. However, it might also happen that the empirical results challenge/support only some of the expected traits, or that the existing corpus data is limited, then not decisive when compared to an expected (theoretical) profile. We consider that, even in this case, the empirical profile (that we attach to the theoretical one) is important since it adds real-use details regarding individual NPIs, and since it might reveal supplementary distributional facts to be considered when comparing more NPI profiles in search for patterns that have not been identified yet. Moreover, in the case of new NPI candidates, even if the empirical data is not enough in order to support or decisively challenge the theoretical expectations, we still end up with a reliable profile, resulted at the end of the first testing phase. Our

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monolingual and cross-lingual data can be used in the investigation. We illustrate this method by testing the English expression (licenser+) sleep a wink, which is expected to represent a typical case of presupposition neutral strong NPI (Sailer 2009 b: 144), and one of its Romanian correspondents1, (licenser+) închide un ochi (lit. close one eye); they have the same idiomatic meaning in negative environments: not to sleep at all. Even if the results proved not to represent the best scenario (i.e. when the theoretical classes are reconfigured as a result of additional corpus information), they could answer a series of research questions related to the theoretical expectations on the distribution of the two NPIs versus their occurrence profiles attested in corpora. The paper is structured as follows: section 2 provides a definition of Negative Polarity Items and describes the main working framework in contrast with traditional accounts of NPI licensing; section 3 delimits the diagnostic distribution patterns for strong NPIs as represented in the literature and formulates the theoretical assumptions about the behaviour of strong NPIs in relation to reading-dependent licensing. In section 4 we present a comparative two-step analysis of the minimizer expression (licenser+) sleep a wink and its Romanian correspondent, (licenser+) închide un ochi. We first compare the theoretical profiles of the English/Romanian pair that result after testing both NPIs in diagnostic environments; then, we check these theoretical profiles against empirical distributional profiles resulted from corpus investigation. A number of concluding remarks and hypotheses for further investigation are formulated in section 5. 2. The Collocational Theory of NPI Licensing and Comparison with other Approaches 2.1. Negative Polarity Items Negative Polarity Items are single words or multi-word expressions that prototypically occur in the scope of negation, but also in other contexts that are semantically or pragmatically interpreted as negative: interrogatives, antecedents of conditional clauses, complement clauses of adversative predicates, the restrictor of universal quantifiers, the scope of imperatives, or merely under a sarcastic2/threat reading, etc.); however, they do not, themselves, express a negation (by contrast with nwords)3 and are characterized by a more or less constrained distribution pattern4. investigation is in an incipient stage and more distributional profiles (including data from more languages) have to be collected. 1 There is also another NPI expression with the same meaning in Romanian, pune geană pe geană (lit. put eyelash on eyelash); we will not discuss this example in the current paper. 2 See, for example, Horn 2016: 289-291 for cases of ‘sarcasm licensing’ – the interpretation is negative as a sarcastic effect. 3 For a discussion regarding Romanian NPIs vs. n-words, see Iordăchioaia 2010: 6, 82-85; Iordăchioaia and Richter 2015: 612-615. 4 Traditionally, some categories of NPIs can be licensed only by antimorphic contexts (overt negation) – superstrong NPIs, other categories can be licensed by antimorphic and anti-additive contexts (comprising nwords and without) – strong NPIs, while other NPIs can be characterized by a less restricted distribution, being licensed by antimorphic, anti-additive, and downward-entailing (and other) contexts – weak NPIs (Zwarts, 1998; van der Wouden, 1997). A specific type of strong NPIs (i.e. lexical content NPIs such as certain minimizers – see Sedivy 1990: 72-90 and Eckardt and Csipak 2013: 296-297) can be licensed also in other categories of environments than traditionally considered, but only under specific readings (e.g.: in

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The negative polarity phrases have an idiomatic reading specific to the obligatory negative contexts in which they occur; consequently, in the absence of a negation expression, such phrases become infelicitous: (1)

a. John didn’t drink a drop (of alcohol) last night. b. #John drank a drop (of alcohol) last night. (Richter et al. 2010: 87)1

As shown by Richter et al. 2010: 87, a sentence such as (1a) containing the minimizer expression drink a drop has the idiomatic reading John did not drink any alcohol at all; however, in (1b), due to the absence of an appropriate licenser, the expression loses the idiomatic meaning (even if the literal meaning – the amount that John drank was one drop) is, in principle, available. Additionally, as van der Wal 1996 points out, when the literal meaning of these expressions is forced into focus, the result is an “anomaly of semantic and pragmatic nature” (being very unlikely that such utterances occur in natural conversation). 2.2. The Collocational Approach The issue of the exact characterization of the licensing contexts has been widely debated in the literature, giving rise to a number of distinct approaches: for example, from the perspective of the syntactic theories of NPI licensing (starting with Klima 1964), NPIs are only appropriate if they are c-commanded by their negative licenser; from the semantic theories perspective (Ladusaw 1980), NPIs are licensed in downward-entailing (DE) contexts; finally, the pragmatic theories (Fauconnier 1975, Krifka 1995, etc.) claim that NPIs give rise to a range of alternatives which are ordered in logical strength/likelihood. Consequently, the NPIs are licensed if the sentence in which they occur is logically the strongest/most surprising with respect to these alternatives (Liu et al. 2013: 351). Negative Polarity Items are analyzed here mainly from a collocational perspective on NPI licensing, as defined by Sailer 2009 a and b. The distribution of NPIs is understood as a special case of collocational restrictions – i.e. NPIs impose occurrence constraints by requiring the presence of a particular semantic operator at the logical form of the sentence2. The main criteria are distributional and NPIs are distinguished according to diagnostic occurrence patterns. An important contribution of the collocational approach is that it highlights the role of the context in NPI licensing (i.e. whether or not an NPI is licensed in a given sentence depends on context-specific aspects of the interpretation since, for example, whether or not an NPI appears felicitously in a conditional clause or in the restrictor of a quantifier depends on the interpretation of the sentence in an episodic or a law-like way) imperatives and questions which are marked for speaker bias, in the restrictor of proportional non-downwardentailing operators/antecedent of a conditional under a law-like interpretation, in the complement clause to non-factive adversative predicates, etc.). For reading-dependentend licensing effects/”non-standard” NPI licensing mechanisms, see Sailer 2009 a and b; Eckardt and Csipak 2013. We will detail reading-dependent licensing cases for English and Romanian strong NPIs in the rest of the paper. 1 The example is infelicitous in affirmative non-emphatic sentences. 2 See also Sailer 2009 b: 355: NPI licensing is “simply an instance of co-occurrence of the NPI with a particular licensing item or structure”.

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and that it clarifies its importance in marking the differences between the classes of NPIs and also in revealing the individual variations within one class1 (see Table 1). This contrasts with previous approaches that either fail to account for the different behaviour of subclasses of NPIs – the pragmatic accounts2 or, in case they correctly predict the more restricted licensing patterns of strong vs. weak NPIs, they cannot capture the reading-dependency of NPI licensing – the entailment-based accounts (see subsection 2.3). The collocational approach formulates the core NPI licensing contexts (where it also integrates the reading-dependent licensing effects) and it isolates the paradigmatic occurrences of the NPI classes; additionally, it offers the mechanisms for matching actual individual NPI candidates to the right NPI class (by specifying a number of diagnostic environments to distinguish between the types of NPIs – see section 3). Another important attribute of the collocational approach is the ability of dealing with the idiosyncratic variations that might characterize individual items since it can integrate the results of corpus linguistics research which, according to Sailer 2009 b: 359, is essential to the further understanding of the phenomenon of NPIs within a given language and also across languages. The cross-linguistic perspective is considered an important test case for comparing different linguistic theories. As the author explains, the collocational, representational account “has its strength in the modelling of idiosyncratic variation, whereas other accounts try to derive many properties of NPIs from independent semantic or pragmatic strategies.” (Sailer 2009 b: 356). The results reported by corpusbased approaches proved that NPIs occurring in roughly the same set of environments may still display some variation with respect to the strength of their affinity to individual contexts – see Hoeksema 1997 and Sailer 2009 b: 59, 254. Therefore, extracting quantitative distributional profiles for individual NPIs from large corpora (i.e. cooccurrence profiles with NPI-licensing elements) is considered an important step (Sailer 2009 b: 355, 359) since it can be used as an empirical basis for identifying and differentiating more (sub)types of NPIs and also for obtaining a clearer picture of the actual use of individual NPIs (i.e. how items are distributed over the various environments in which they are licensed). Moreover, obtaining detailed distributional profiles of different NPIs from many languages can also determine how polarity items differ on a language-to-language basis3. 2.3. Comparison with other Approaches A detailed analysis of the previous approaches (and of the problems that they face) is given, for instance, in Sailer 2009 a: 459-461 and Sailer 2009 b: 58-64; 98-101.

According to Sailer 2009 b: 42, 46, any successful theory of NPI licensing “must be fine-grained enough to account for the fact that different NPIs are sensitive to different licensing contexts”. 2 For a discussion regarding the inability of pragmatic analyses to predict the narrow distribution of strong NPIs (and specifically of minimizer NPIs such as lift a finger) and for a possible solution to this problem, see also Eckardt and Csipak 2013: 267-276. 3 An interesting case is, for example, the distribution of the Greek NPI kanenas as compared with its English translation equivalent any (see Sailer 2009 b 356): even if they manifest distributional overlap for a core set of data, the Greek NPI occurs in modal contexts in which NPI-any is excluded; moreover, it is not felicitous in the scope of only, a context in which NPI-any is licensed. 1

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As an illustration, in the case of pragmatic approaches, it is claimed that NPIs are possible in the restrictor of most in case there is a contextually supported inference from sets to subsets, i.e. a pragmatic inference that behaves like downward entailment (2a), and that they are excluded from contexts where the inference is similar to upward entailment (2b): (2)

a. Most students who could solve even a single puzzle got a prize. b.*Most students who could solve even a single puzzle had trouble on the exam. (Israel 2004: 726)

However, the ungrammaticality of (2b) seems to be related to the special scalar behaviour of an NPI such as even since, for example, ever is equally fine with both types of inference: (3)

a. Most students who could ever solve a single puzzle got a prize. b. Most students who could ever solve a single puzzle had trouble on the exam. (Sailer 2009 a: 460)

Moreover, the type of pragmatic inference fails to account for the ungrammatical behaviour of NPIs in the restrictor of a cardinal determiner, as opposed to proportional determiners: (4)

a.*Several students who could ever solve the easy puzzle got a prize. b. Several students who could solve the easy puzzle got a prize. → Several students who could solve the hard puzzle got a prize. (Sailer 2009 a: 460)

In (4a), even if the example is compatible with a DE contextual inference similarly to (3a), the NPI ever is excluded from the restrictor of a cardinal determiner such as several. In conclusion, as Sailer 2009 a. points out, the success of NPI licensing in the restrictor of a determiner is not related to the available pragmatic inferences/their direction, but to a difference in interpretation (proportional vs. cardinal) that characterizes the determiner. On the other hand, the entailment-based approaches are shown to correctly predict the core occurrence contexts of NPIs and the more restricted distribution of strong NPIs (according to Zwarts 1998, for example, weak NPIs are required in the scope of downward-entailing operators1, while strong NPIs are required in anti-additive contexts2); however, as pointed out by Sailer 2009 a: 459, these approaches cannot capture the reading-dependent effects. A context “X_Y” is downward entailing iff for each A, B, where A denotes a subset of B, “X B Y” implies “X A Y”: No congressman supports the bill. → No conservative congressman supports the bill. 2 A context “X_Y” is anti-additive iff for each A, B, “X A Y and X B Y” is equivalent to “X A or B Y”: 1

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Indeed, the entailment behaviour does not seem to change according to reading: for example, in a sentence such as (5) the restrictor of every is anti-additive, irrespective of the law-like or episodic interpretation (we can also read (5) as an episodic observation about the current students.)1: (5)

Every student who studies English or French knows Latin.  Every student who studies English knows Latin and every student who studies French knows Latin. (Sailer 2009 a: 459)

Within the entailment-based approach, both weak and strong NPIs are correctly expected to appear in the restrictor of a strong anti-additive determiner such as every since, on the one hand, all NPIs that are allowed in downward-entailing contexts are also allowed in anti-additive contexts and, on the other hand, strong NPIs require an antiadditive context in order to be licensed (Sailer 2009 a: 50). However, the this approach cannot account for the fact that strong NPIs are not licensed under an episodic reading (6b), while they are perfectly felicitous under a law-like reading (6a), or for the fact that weak NPIs are licensed in both interpretations (7): (6)

(7)

a. Every restaurant that charges so much as a dime for iceberg lettuce should be shut down. b.#Every restaurant that charges so much as a dime for iceberg lettuce happens to have four stars in the handbook. (Heim 1984: 104) a. Every restaurant that is ever mentioned in the Cosmopolitan should be shut down. b. Every restaurant that was ever mentioned in the Cosmopolitan happens to have four stars in the handbook. (Sailer 2009 a: 457)

A similar observation is available in the case of NPIs occurring in the antecedent of conditionals, context that can display variations for both (episodic and non-episodic) readings. The entailment-based theories also fail to account for the licensing potential of proportional determiners and for the role of the cardinal/proportional distinction in NPI licensing. This can be illustrated, for example, with determiners such as most and few: Most is traditionally expected not to license NPIs in its restrictor since it is non-DE; however, it has been shown in the literature (especially by Israel 2004 and Sailer 2009 a and b) that most can license both weak (8) and strong NPIs (9) in its restrictor, which is a general characteristic of proportional determiners (Sailer 2009 b: 15, 61). Additionally, it was specified that proportional determiners2 license strong NPIs in their restrictor, but only under a law-like (non-episodic) reading (compare (9) with (10)): (8)

Most students who’ve ever read of Hegel seem to wear hats.

Nobody smokes at a party and nobody drinks at a party.  Nobody smokes or drinks at a party. 1 For a definition of law-like vs. episodic readings, see Sailer 2009 a: 456. 2 Here, most is an unambiguously proportional determiner, by contrast with some and many, for example.

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Most students who’ve read the least bit of poetry will be familiar with Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice Cream”. (10) *Most students who’ve read the least bit of Hegel seem to wear hats. (Israel 1995: 167) (9)

Another situation refers to a determiner like few that is DE in its scope: (11) Few congressmen ate.  Few congressmen ate fish. Therefore, according to the traditional entailment-based accounts, it is expected that strong NPIs cannot occur in the scope of few1; however, it has been demonstrated that, in its cardinal interpretation, few (│A ∩ B│ is small) does not license strong NPIs, as opposed to its proportional interpretation (│A ∩ B│is a small percentage of │A│) where strong NPIs are marginally acceptable: (12) *Few authors earn a red cent with their first novels. (cardinal) (13) ?Few of them spent a red cent on their outfits. (proportional) (Israel 1996:14) (14) Few Americans have been to Spain. Few Canadians have either. (proportional) (Rullmann, 2003) Comparing (13) with (14), we notice that, in its proportional interpretation, few licenses strong NPIs such as either2; however, it is not fully grammatical with emphatic minimizers3, even if the occurrence of this particular type of strong NPIs is improved in the scope of proportional few (Sailer 2009 b: 271). To conclude, the classical entailment-based theories cannot account for the distinction between law-like and episodic readings; similarly, they cannot satisfactorily explain the occurrence of NPIs in the restrictor of most (and of other non-DE strong quantifiers) or the occurrence of strong NPIs in the scope/restrictor of non-anti-additive proportional quantifiers such as few. 3. Diagnostic Distribution Patterns and Reading-dependent Licensing The following table delineates the core licensing contexts established as diagnostics in the collocational approach4. The English examples from Table 1 illustrate 1 Strong NPIs are standardly assumed to be licensed in the scope of downward monotone anti-additive operators. 2 Other studies prove that, according to its distribution in diagnostic environments, this negative-polarity particle displays a behaviour that is similar to a distinct class, clause-bounded NPIs (Sailer 2009 b: 41). 3 See also Israel 1996: 633 for an interpretation of the behaviour of few with emphatic minimizers. 4 Apart from traditional NPI classes such as weak and strong that we have defined at the beginning of the paper, and that display different distributional behaviours when checked against this core set (see Sailer 2009 b: 32-38), Sailer identified a new class – clause-bounded NPIs; these NPIs display a totally distinct pattern when tested against the same set of environments (i.e., they behave like weak NPIs with respect to clausemate licensers, but like strong NPIs when contained in a complement clause with the licenser in the matrix clause). We will not discuss cases of clause-bounded NPIs in this paper; however, this is enough to show that testing against these diagnostic environments can lead to identification of other NPI classes.

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the prototypical distribution pattern of strong NPIs; the reading-dependent variations that characterize the licensing environments are also represented1. We will make use of these core patterns in the first phase of the testing process applied for the NPI candidates: testing in diagnostic environments (see section 4). Examples2

Diagnostic Environment CMN (Clausemate Negation)

clausemate sentential negation expressed on the verb POS positive, non-emphatic statements NW (N-Word) scope of a clausemate nword restrictor of a clausemate n-word WITHOUT scope of without

ok

As a result, they don’t pay a red cent./Pat won’t lift a finger to help me.

*

*Pat lifted a finger to help me.

ok

We will never send a red cent to them./Nobody will lift a finger to help Pat. [No one with a red cent in his pocket] would support this artist./[No reporter who has the slightest understanding of crime] would suggest such a story.

ok

ok

Alfred came to the party without lifting a finger to help with the preparations.

*

*Not many authors earn a red cent with their first novels. / *Not every student lifts a finger to help his neighbour. / *Few people slept a wink.3

ok

[Every restaurant that charges so much as a dime for iceberg lettuce] should be shut down./[Everyone who gives a red cent to those guys], should be punished. *[Every restaurant that charges so much as a dime for iceberg lettuce] happens to have four stars in the handbook. /*[Everyone who gives a red cent to those guys], will get a medal.

DENT (DownwardEntailing)

scope of downwardentailing few, not many, not every, at most UNIV (Restrictor of Universal Quantifier)

restrictor of a strong quantifier in a “law-like” sentence restrictor of a strong quantifier in an “episodic” sentence

*

1 It is important to clarify, at this point, that we do not attempt to derive the distributional properties of the NPIs from their lexical meaning, strategy that is largely applied by semantic-pragmatic approaches (it has been shown, for example, by Sailer 2009 b: 89-92 that these theories still face a number of problems concerning the different behaviour of subclasses of NPIs and intervention effects). However, we are making use of semantic-pragmatic information if it contributes to clarifying the distributional patterns derived from the collocational analysis. 2 Most of the examples are provided by Sailer, 2009 b: 27-28, 32-35. 3 The collocational theory predicts that occurrences of strong NPIs in weak contexts might be marginally attested and not fully ungrammatical. This is confirmed by studies focusing on the investigation of the corpus data (such as in the detailed distribution profiles resulted from the DFG project NPIs Between Syntactic and Pragmatic Licensing, www.negative-polarity-items.uni-goettingen.de/wiki/index.php/ProjectResource).

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IF (Conditional) If-clause in threats and “law-like” sentences If-clause in promises and “episodic” sentences

*

If you give a red cent to those guys, I’ll never speak to you again. *If Paul earned a red cent last night, he had his first lucky day in weeks./*If you give a red cent to those guys, you’ll get a medal.

ok

Personally, I don’t think Paul should pay a red cent for you.

*

*Pat didn’t claim that Chris gave a red cent to charity./*I don’t claim that Pat will lift a finger to help you. / *I didn’t say that John likes Mary one bit.

ok

I really doubt they are spending a red cent more on gifted kids than on regular kids.

*

*Pat is surprised that Chris gave a red cent to charity.

ok

Did Mary contribute a red cent for this cause? Who contributed a red cent for this cause?

*

*Who lifted a finger to help Sue? *Did John give a damn about their complaints?

ok

nCMN (Non-Clausemate Negation)

complement clause to a negated neg raising predicate (think, believe) complement clause to negated matrix predicates other than neg raising predicates (claim, say, whisper, shout) NV (Negative Verb) complement clause to a non-factive adversative predicate (deny, doubt) complement clause to a factive adversative predicate (be surprised, regret, refuse) QUE (Question) negatively biased rhetorical questions (both yes/no-questions and whquestions) non-rhetorical questions (request for information)

Table 1: Diagnostic distribution patterns – typical distribution of strong NPIs According to Table 1, strong NPIs cannot typically occur in the scope of a DE quantifier such as an NP with the determiners few/not every, nor is a strong NPI possible in affirmative clauses. Strong NPIs can appear in the scope of clausemate negation or of an n-word such as no/nobody, and in the scope of without. They can also occur in negatively biased rhetorical questions. The acceptability of strong NPIs is reading dependent since in the same general environment (e.g.: the complement clause to a negated matrix predicate/to an adversative predicate, the restrictor of a universal quantifier, the antecedent of conditionals, etc.) there are individual realizations or readings that exclude strong NPIs, but also individual realizations or readings that allow for strong NPIs: As Table 1 shows, strong NPIs are licensed in the context of negated neg raising predicates (such as think, believe), but they are not felicitous in the context of negated bridge verbs (such as claim, say)/negated non9

bridge verbs (such as whisper, shout); they are felicitous with non-factive adversative predicates (deny, doubt), yet they are strange in the complement clause of factive adversative predicates (be surprised, regret). Additionally, they are licensed in syntactic constructions such as the restrictor of a universal quantifier and in if-clauses with law-like readings, yet they are excluded from the same constructions if they have an episodic or promise interpretation. In subsection 2.3 we have also shown that strong NPIs are generally licensed in the restrictor of proportional determiners, but only under a law-like reading. This generalization regarding the occurrence of strong NPIs exclusively in nonepisodic readings seems to be challenged by the fact that allegedly felicitous occurrences of strong NPIs have been reported in the literature in weak contexts such as the scope of the Strawson DE1 only that introduces a positive presupposition: (15) Only John has any friend. Presupposition: John has a friend. For example, Giannakidou considers the English minimizer sleep a wink to be grammatical in an example such as: (16) Only Larry slept a wink. (Giannakidou 2006: 577) In fact, Giannakidou 2006: 583 proved that there are cross-linguistic differences concerning NPI licensing in the scope of only, by contrasting the English (weak) NPI any with the Greek correspondent kanenas (the latter being ungrammatical in such an environment): (17) a. Only John has any friend. b. *Monon o Janis exi kanenan filo. (Greek) In the collocational theory (Sailer 2009 b: 144), this licensing behaviour is explained by the assumption that NPIs are, in fact, presupposition sensitive or presupposition neutral: English any is grammatical in the scope of only since it is a

1 A function f of type is Strawson-DE iff for all x, y of type σ such that x ⇒ y and f (x) is defined: f(y) ⇒ f(x). The most important difference to the usual definition of downward entailingness is the condition that f (x) be defined. The adverb only is not downward-entailing in the usual sense (even if the premise is true, Jones might be, in fact, a poultry farmer; therefore, the inference is not generally valid.); regular downward-entailment does not hold: Only Jones is a farmer. -/-> Only Jones is a sheep farmer. Only is Strawson-DE: Since a sentence of the form Only p presupposes p, we can include the proposition Jones is a sheep farmer in the premises in order to check for Strawson-DEness. This makes the inference valid: Only Jones is a farmer. Jones is a sheep farmer. ∴Only Jones is a sheep farmer.

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weak presupposition neutral NPI, while its Greek correspondent, kanenas, is excluded from the scope of the same operator since it is presupposition sensitive. Analogously, an equivalent distinction is assumed in the case of strong NPIs. Therefore, it is expected that only a certain subclass should be excluded from episodic readings: presupposition sensitive strong NPIs (which is actually representative for strong NPIs). Additionally, there should also be a subclass of strong NPIs that is presupposition neutral and, as a result, it is predicted to be licensed in if-clauses and in the restrictor of a universal, irrespective of the law-like/episodic interpretation. In assuming this, Sailer starts from Horn’s claim that the different types of reading, law-like vs. episodic, are actually related to a difference in presupposition: there is an existential presupposition in episodic statements, but there is no such presupposition in law-like statements (Horn 1997). A similar existential presupposition can be usually found with proportional determiners as in the following examples with every and most – both presuppose that there are in fact students in class (Sailer 2009 b: 138): (18) a. Every student from my class was sitting in the library. b. Most students from my class were sitting in the library. In (19) most appears in a law-like universal statement (that can be true even without there being students who miss three lectures): (19) Most students who miss three lectures fail the class. Examples (18) and (19) prove that the existential presupposition of proportional determiners is actually suspended in non-episodic readings; a similar reasoning can be applied in the case of the existential presupposition that is cancelled in law-like readings1 corresponding to if-clauses and the restrictor of strong quantifiers. This would explain why presupposition sensitive strong NPIs are allowed only in law-like readings, while presupposition neutral strong NPIs are expected to appear in both readings. In hypothesising the existence of the presupposition neutral strong NPIs, Sailer 2009 b discusses the minimizer sleep a wink as the typical example. Additionally, it is mentioned that this is an issue that needs to be investigated empirically in a more systematic way. 4. Distributional Profiles of sleep a wink/închide un ochi In this section, we present a comparative two-level analysis of the expressions (licenser +) sleep a wink and the Romanian correspondent (licenser +) închide un ochi 1 In Giannakidou’s approach, this would count as a nonveridical context. One issue that has been remarked in relation to this theory is overgeneration: nonveridicality is the weakest occurrence condition for NPIs; therefore, strong NPIs will have to be allowed in nonveridical contexts in general, which may lead to a serious overgeneration (see Sailer 2009 a: 459).

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(lit. close one eye) in order to check the theoretical model against the empirical results generated by corpus investigation. The two items are tested in two steps, according to a method for “profiling” NPIs that has been prefigured in the collocational theory as defined by Sailer 2009 a and b and that presupposes I. testing in diagnostic environments and II. testing the distribution of individual NPIs against large corpora and/or against “acceptability” judgements of native speakers1 (we will mainly consider corpus analysis in this paper). At the end of phase I, we obtain a theoretical profile by verifying the NPIs in relation to a pre-defined core set of licensing contexts that corresponds to prototypical distribution patterns for the known classes of NPIs (see the previous chapters for details). This core is postulated as flexible in the collocational theory since it can be further modelled once additional empirical data is processed, and the classes can be reconfigured. Moreover, even comparing the typical distribution of more individual NPIs (from one or several languages) with this theoretical model could lead to the identification of more distribution patterns than initially presumed.2 At the end of phase II results an empirical profile, meaning a corpus profile and/or a profile obtained after a psycholinguistic experiment. This second profile might reveal supplementary distributional facts that better capture the individual idiosyncrasies and that can support or even challenge the intitial theoretical profile. In the best scenario, the theoretical model can be improved by identifying new distribution patterns. In the case of the expressions analyzed, we intend to verify the theoretical assumptions provided by the collocational theory regarding the licensing behaviour of presupposition neutral strong NPIs in relation to the distribution patterns attested at corpus investigation. The tool and corpora are available via the Sketch Engine3. 4.1. Testing in Diagnostic Environments (Theoretical Profile) In this subsection we generate the theoretical (qualitative) profiles of sleep a wink/închide un ochi, based on the diagnostic environments provided by the collocational theory that are considered relevant in order to distinguish between the possible theoretical NPI classes. In this phase, we mostly rely on linguistic introspection (even if we provide some examples from corpora in order to illustrate our intuitions). In the case of sleep a wink, we also make use of previous assumptions made in the literature. For the Romanian expression, there is no previous qualitative/quantitative research4 focusing on its distributional profile; therefore, analyzing it in comparison with the English

1 The cases when certain structures are not attested in corpora do not necessarily imply that they are theoretically unacceptable for native speakers; adding psycholinguistic experiments might help in better understanding seemingly contradictory data resulted from corpus investigations (see, for example, the experiments proposed by Onea and Sailer 2013). 2 See, for example, the new class of clause-bounded NPIs identified by Sailer 2009 b. 3 the.sketchengine.co.uk 4 As a notable exception, the expression închide un ochi has an initial qualitative profile, which differs in some respect from the current analysis, in the Collection of Romanian Negative Polarity Items (CODIINPI.ro - hosted by Goethe University Frankfurt (www.english-linguistics.de)), resource that we are currently updating (for details, see M. Rizea et al. 2016: 173-185).

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correspondent may reveal interesting facts on both NPIs. We first sum up the expectations on the distribution of sleep a wink from previous theoretical studies; subsequently, we analyse the Romanian NPI in comparison with the English NPI, taking into consideration the diagnostic environments specified in the collocational theory (as defined by Sailer 2009 a and b). Our expectations are that the Romanian expression has a similar distribution to sleep a wink in diagnostic environments. In section 3 we mentioned that there are theoretical studies where sleep a wink is considered felicitous in the scope of only (example (16)), which implies that it is a presupposition neutral NPI (similarly to any). Tested in the diagnostic context of few/not every, it is rejected, which proves that it is a strong NPI (see Sailer 2009 b: 88): (20) *Few people slept a wink. (21) *Not every driver slept a wink. Being a presupposition neutral strong NPI, it is also expected not to be excluded from episodic readings in if-clauses and in the restrictor of every (Sailer 2009 b: 144): (22) If you slept a wink during my lecture, you have missed the announcement of the homework. (23) Every student who slept a wink during my lecture missed an important announcement. Next, we test the Romanian expression închide un ochi in diagnostic environments, also comparing its distributional profile resulted in this phase with the profile of its English correspondent, sleep a wink:  CMN (Clausemate Negation) clausemate sentential negation expressed on the verb (24) a. Mă duc și eu la culcare, dar mi-e teama că nu voi închide un ochi. (OPUS2 Romanian) b. I' m going to bed, too, but I' m afraid I won’t sleep a wink. (OPUS2 English)  POS positive, non-emphatic statements (25) a. *Am închis un ochi noaptea trecută. b. *I slept a wink last night.  NW (N-Word) scope of a clausemate n-word (26) a. Ne-am distrat așa de bine, că nimeni n-a închis un ochi. b. We were having so much fun, no one slept a wink. 13

restrictor of a clausemate n-word (27) a. #Niciun petrecăreț care a închis un ochi nu s-a plâns a doua zi la muncă. b. #No reveller who slept a wink complained the following day at work. Understood as a mere non-emphatic statement, (27) is not felicitous. However, it becomes felicitous if it is understood as a case of denial: (28)

a. Niciun petrecăreț care (chiar) a închis un ochi nu s-a plâns a doua zi la muncă. b. No reveller who did sleep a wink complained the following day at work.

Therefore, in examples such as (28), it is not the negative determiner that licenses these cases1 so we will not interpret them as relevant for this diagnostic context2. There are also other structures that are felicitous in Romanian, yet they contain a subjunctive3 or a perfect conditional mood (and they are felicitous precisely because they imply that the event did not take place, or that the speaker doubts it happened): (29)

a. Niciun petrecăreț care ar fi închis un ochi nu s-ar fi plâns a doua zi la muncă. b. ?No reveller who had slept a wink would have complained the following day at work.

Similarly, we will not consider examples such as (29) to be relevant for this test.  WITHOUT scope of without (“fără”) (30) a. [...] a plâns neîncetat zile și nopți la rând, fără să mai închidă un ochi. (RoTenTen16) b. [...] she/he’s been crying day and night without sleeping a wink.  DENT (Downward-Entailing) scope of downward-entailing few (“puțini/puține”), not many (“nu mulți/nu multe”), not every (“nu orice”), at most (“cel mult”) (31) a. (Maria n-a închis un ochi toată noaptea.) b. (Mary didn’t sleep a wink all night.) c. #Puțini oameni au închis un ochi toată noaptea.1 1

For a discussion regarding the licensing of lexical content NPIs in denial contexts, see, for example, Sedivy 1990: 98. 2 For a similar observation regarding such non-standard NPI-licensing mechanisms (that should be related to pragmatic factors), see Onea and Sailer 2013: 347. 3 An example with the subjunctive is N-au întâlnit [niciun turist care să fi închis un ochi noaptea trecută]. (intended: They didn’t meet any tourist to have slept a wink last night./They met no tourist to have slept a wink last night.) A structure with the indicative is odd, unless it is understood as a case of denial: *N-au întâlnit [niciun turist care a închis un ochi noaptea trecută]. (intended: They didn’t meet any tourist that slept a wink last night.) vs. N-au întâlnit [niciun turist care (chiar) a închis un ochi noaptea trecută]. (intended: They didn’t meet any tourist that did sleep a wink last night).

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d. #Few people slept a wink all night. (32) a. ?Puțini concurenți au închis un ochi noaptea trecută. b. ?Few competitors slept a wink last night. (33) a. #Nu orice concurent a închis un ochi noaptea trecută. b. #Not every competitor slept a wink last night.  UNIV (Restrictor of Universal Quantifier) restrictor of a strong quantifier in a “law-like” sentence (34) a. Fiecare polițist care a închis un ochi în noaptea aceea ar trebui pedepsit. b. Every policeman who slept a wink that night should be punished. restrictor of a strong quantifier in an “episodic” sentence (35) a. Fiecare copil care va închide un ochi în noaptea asta va primi un cadou. b. Every child who sleeps a wink tonight will receive a present. (36) a. Fiecare suporter care a închis ieri un ochi se întâmplă să fie din orașul în care se joacă finala. b. Every supporter who slept a wink yesterday happens to be from the city where the final is played.  IF (Conditional) If-clause in threats and “law-like” sentences (37) a. Dacă un polițist a închis un ochi în noaptea aceea, ar trebui pedepsit. b. If a policeman slept a wink that night, he should be punished. If-clause in promises and “episodic” sentences (38) a. Dacă un copil închide un ochi în noaptea asta, va primi un cadou. b. If a child sleeps a wink tonight, he/she will receive a present.  QUE (Question) negatively biased rhetorical questions (both yes/no-questions and wh-questions) (39) a. Cine a putut închide un ochi cât timp ai țipat? b. Who could sleep a wink while you were shouting? non-rhetorical questions (request for information) (40) a. #Cine a închis un ochi aseară? b. #Who slept a wink last night? Example (40) is odd if understood as request for information. The fact that puțini/puține is not a good licenser for the NPI închide un ochi is also supported by evidence found in corpora: there are absolutely no results in the three corpora we investigated (more details in subsection 4.2). In the case of English, we found only one example when sleep a wink is licensed by few (proportional) in the corpora that we have verified (Table 2): I can imagine that few of you will be able to sleep a wink tonight [...] (enTenTen13). 1

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 ONLY scope of only (“numai/doar”) (41) a. ?Numai Ion a închis un ochi aseară. b. Only John slept a wink last night. As shown in (41a), we do not consider închide un ochi fully felicitous in the scope of numai. In (41b), we repeat the judgement from Sailer 2009 b: 144 apud. Giannakidou 2006. After the first testing phase (in diagnostic environments), we obtain a preliminary theoretical profile of the two expressions. If we focus on the Romanian expression, its NPI status is confirmed1 by the fact that it is intuitively excluded from positive (non-emphatic) statements, that it is licensed in negative contexts (both clausemate sentential negation and the scope of n-words) and in the scope of without. Tests such as acceptability of the occurrence in the scope of downward-entailing operators and its typical appearance in negatively-biased rhetorical questions classify it as a strong NPI. Even if both (Romanian and English) NPIs seem, in certain occurrences, not fully ungrammatical in the scope of the downward entailing operator few in its proportional reading, this does not challenge their strong NPI status since, in these conditions, licensing by few cannot be considered a distinctive trait (in its typical behaviour, proportional few does not license sleep a wink/închide un ochi in its scope2); additionally, they are both excluded from the scope of not every3, an unambiguously weak licenser4. Moreover, the predictions about the acceptability of the English sleep a wink, irrespective of the episodic/law-like reading, in the antecedent of a conditional/scope of a universal quantifier are also confirmed, theoretically, in the case of the Romanian NPI. We end up with a presupposition neutral strong NPI preliminary profile, both expressions displaying similar behaviours in terms of distribution in core contexts. 4.2. Empirical Profile In the next stage, we check if the theoretical expectations about the licensing behaviour of the two NPIs are verified in real-use. We first investigate the distribution of sleep a wink/închide un ochi in corpora, in relation to the operator only (“numai/doar”), 1

This remains to be checked against the results from phase two, when we explore the percentage of positive occurrences in corpora. 2 When defining the typical licensing contexts that exclude strong NPIs, Sailer 2009 b : 35 mentions the scope of few, even if he admits cases of “not fully ungrammatical” occurrences as in Israel’s example ??Few of them spent a red cent on their outfits. 3A similar case is discussed by Sailer 2009 b: 57 when NPIs that are marginally licensed by (a proportional) few are still classified as strong NPIs; they all pass the stronger test of not being licensed in the scope of not every that unambiguously excludes strong NPIs. See also Krifka 1995 for strong NPIs attested in the scope of weak licensers such as few. 4 The difference in acceptability in the case of few and not every with sleep a wink is also supported by the results of an experiment performed on 15 informants (De Decker et al. 2005), showing that sleep a wink is considered somewhat acceptable in the scope of few, while somewhat unacceptable in the scope of not every. We will provide details about this experiment in the rest of the paper.

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since this was a criterion for proposing a distinct subclass of strong NPIs that is presupposition neutral. In order to obtain clear results, we also check the distribution of the two NPIs in connection with other Strawson-DE operators such as the only (“singurul/unicul”), and with the (simply) DE few (“puțini/puține”) that was typically considered not to license strong NPIs (remember that in the preliminary theoretical investigation, we considered that both expressions pass this test i.e. they are not naturally licensed by few, even if they might be marginally attested in real-use and not fully ungrammatical1). In case the expressions are marginally attested in the scope of only in corpora, we will use a similar reasoning for not considering this context typical – then not counting as distinctive in creating the new subclass of presupposition neutral strong NPIs. Subsequently, we investigate the distribution of sleep a wink/închide un ochi in relation to the other relevant licensing contexts that we examined for the theoretical profile. We also pay attention to the occurrence of the expressions in relation to licensors such as (conditional) if (“dacă”), and every (“fiecare/orice”) since another prediction was that, as presupposition neutral NPIs, they should felicitously occur in episodic readings. We have mainly used the following corpora: English Web 2013 (enTenTen13) and Romanian Web 2016 (roTenTen16). All corpora that we analysed in this paper (and their description) are accessible online, via the Sketch Engine tool. The first striking detail revealed by the corpus research is that the restrictive adverb only is not attested at all in the corpora investigated2 as a licenser of the minimizer sleep a wink3. We performed this check in seven English corpora and the Google UK interface4. The following tables list the corpora investigated via the Sketch Engine tool, the size of each corpus, and the number of occurrences of sleep a wink/închide un ochi:

Table 2: Distribution of sleep a wink 1 This is actually a prediction of the collocational theory about the behaviour of strong NPIs in general (occurrences of strong NPIs in weak contexts might be marginally attested and not fully ungrammatical). 2 The fact that several corpora show 0 occurrences for a certain licenser-NPI collocation is important since it proves that it is not a regular collocation (even if it is possible to be marginally attested elsewhere, currently or in the future). 3 We should mention that there are also theoretical studies that do not consider sleep a wink felicitous in the scope of only: see Horn 1997: 163 ?#Only Chris slept a wink last night. 4 In the latter, we found only five results, all the relevant ones being attested in the theoretical studies that claim its felicity in combination with sleep a wink.

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Table 3: Distribution of închide un ochi Tables 2 and 3 show that occurrences of sleep a wink with licensers such as few (DE) and only/the only (Strawson-DE) are not at all regular collocations in the corpora investigated. Moreover, the Romanian variant, închide un ochi, displays the same behaviour1. This does not seem to be a case of underrepresentation of a particular context in corpora since, in fact, sleep a wink/închide un ochi do not exhibit a different distribution pattern than generally attested for minimizers. In his 2013 study that reports results of corpus investigation for languages such as English, Dutch, and German, Hoeksema shows that minimizers have been confirmed, very marginally, in the scope of only and in the scope of other Strawson DE contexts such as the superlative-like environment the only (see Hoeksema 2013: 63, 64, 70). Minimizers appear with a “nearly nonexistent” general distribution in such contexts – they are reported as below 1% in both contexts even if with a slight variation in favour of the only: (41) Over 150 other kids knew about it, and I was the only person to do a damn thing about it. (Hoeksema 2013: 63) At a Google search, we could find only 4 (different) results for sleep a wink in the scope of the only; one such example is 42: (42)

Shout out to Zach King, who approached this as a sleeping challenge [...] and he was the only person who slept a wink that night.2

To conclude, the results of corpus analysis reveal that the occurrence of sleep a wink/închide un ochi in the scope of only (“numai/doar”), and even in the scope of other Strawson-DE operators, is marginal and comparable with their distribution with few (“puțini/puține”); therefore, this particular trait proves unable to support a typology of presupposition neutral strong NPIs (in the same way in which few was typically considered not to license strong NPIs, and sleep a wink in particular, even if it was acknowledged that strong NPIs might be marginally attested with weak licensers such as

The two combinations that we have found, for example, in roTenTen16 with doar (“only”) are not relevant for our test since doar collocates with închide un ochi (lit. close one eye), which is understood as turn a blind eye on sth., after a contamination with the Romanian expression închide ochii (la ceva) (lit. close the eyes at sth.), which is not polarity sensitive (it is a neutral idiom). We will provide more details in the rest of the paper. 2 Google search on February 7, 2017. Web site:http://tvline.com/2016/03/04/amazing-race-season-28episode-4-recap-joslyn-erin/. We thank Manfred Sailer for providing this example. 1

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few in real-use, and not fully ungrammatical – see Sailer 2009 b: 35 for a definition of the typical licensing contexts that exclude strong NPIs). To complete the empirical profile, we will also mention the results of an experiment1 based on native speaker intuitions performed by De Decker et al. 2005, which points to the (minor) difference in acceptability of sleep a wink in the scope of few (slightly above somewhat acceptable) and only (slightly below somewhat acceptable).

Figure 1: Rating grammatical acceptability of sleep a wink and its licensers (De Decker et al. 2005) Even if only has a higher score than other licensers (2.9), it is not fully acceptable (4) and it is slightly worse than few (3.1). We take the evaluation of acceptability in terms of informants’ input as an extra argument for the fact that licensing in the scope of only is not natural for sleep a wink and that it is, therefore, unable to support a new typology of presupposition neutral strong NPIs. We continue the corpus investigation in order to verify another presumption made in the theoretical profiles of sleep a wink/închide un ochi: they were expected to differ from the other strong NPIs in what concerns the distribution in if-clauses and the restrictor of a universal, being licensed irrespective of the law-like or episodic reading: context if4 dacă every fiecare/orice negation DENT (approximators)5 without question other6

sleep a wink2 enTenTen13 N % 2 0 0 0 840 80 112 10 7 1 1 0 92 9 1,054 100

închide un ochi3 roTenTen16 N % 0 0 0 0 193 61 7 2 2 7 1 0 112 35 320 100

total

Table 4: Distribution profiles of sleep a wink/închide un ochi 1

Once more, we are thankful to Manfred Sailer for this reference. Query a, wink 12,960 > Positive filter sleep 1,054 (0.05 per million). 3 Query un, ochi 20,580 > Positive filter închide 320 (0.10 per million). 4 Antecedent of a conditional. 5 Operators such as hardly, barely, scarcely, almost etc; the first two are represented with 61 and 45 occurrences. Few / not every are excluded here. 6 It includes misspellings of the licensor (e.g. couldnt instead of couldn’t) and not the intended structure. 2

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As Table 4 shows, we did not find corpus results in order to validate, quantitatively, our theoretical expectations. However, we found an example that seems to illustrate the ability of sleep a wink of being acceptable in episodic readings as well (it allows the interpretation of an episodic observation about a particular person) – certainly, this is irrelevant in terms of judging typical behaviour, and more tests need to be performed: (44) Sleep Tight (Mientras Duermes) – you'll be lucky if you sleep a wink afterwards. (enTenTen13) At this point of the investigation, the scarce attestation of the two NPIs in conditionals and in the restrictor of every (see the pie charts below that indicate the difference in strength regarding the affinity of the expressions for the main licensing environments) makes the arguments related to corpus investigation irrelevant for verifying the theoretical assumptions. Repeating the search in more corpora for both (English and Romanian) expressions and checking their acceptability in episodic readings in experiments performed on native speakers might offer a clearer perspective.

Figure 2: Pie chart of the occurrence profile of sleep a wink

Figure 3: Pie chart of the occurrence profile of închide un ochi 20

The corpus investigation also proves that both minimizers are largely attested in negative contexts, which was already pointed out by Hoeksema 2013: 63-64 in his analysis of minimizers. In the case of the Romanian NPI, there is a homonymy with a literal structure from the common language, completely unmarked, which refers to the event of closing one eye; moreover, there is also a common case of confusion with another idiom, which is not polarity sensitive, închide ochii (la ceva) (lit. close the eyes (at sth.)), which explains the use of the expression închide un ochi with the meaning of turn a blind eye (on sth.) – example (43) – and its unexpected distribution (since it is used as the non-NPI expression to which it is erroneously assimilated).1 (43) A fost amenințat cu moartea. Trebuia doar să închid un ochi și să tac din pix. (roTenTen16) He was threatened with death. I just had to turn a blind eye and stop writing. This justifies the fact that the Romanian construction (then not necessarily the minimizer) appears more frequently in positive contexts in corpora when compared with sleep a wink (see also the higher percentage of distribution in rapport with OTHER2 attested for the Romanian expression, by contrast with the English NPI). This homonymy with non-NPI cases makes the Romanian minimizer to be perceived as weaker, even if it matches the profile of a strong NPI according to the distribution tests in diagnostic environments. It would make sense, in such cases, to separate the homonyms and to keep only the minimizer uses as relevant for the individual distribution profiles. Indeed, if we exclude from the representation the occurrences of the literal structure (common in language) and those pointing to a neutral idiom3, we remain with only three occurrences of the minimizer închide un ochi in marked positive structures (as attested in roTenTen16). This operation is drastically changing the percentual representation in favour of negative contexts (i.e. 92%) (Figure 4).

1

Therefore, there are theoretically (at least) three situations when the structure închide un ochi can be used in positive sentences: 1. when it appears as a non-idiomatic combination with a literal mening, 2. when it “adopts” the distribution of a non-polarity sensitive idiom that has a completely different meaning and that causes ambiguity because of its formal resemblance, and 3. when the (real) minimizer is used in a positive context emphatically (i.e. in marked contexts). See the example attested in roTenTen16: Stai frate cât vrei, numai dă- mi un semn ca să mă întorc ṣi eu pe partea cealaltă ṣi să închid un ochi timp de zece ore (in this occurrence, even the minimal gesture of closing one eye implied by the sleeping activity is considered to be enough for the speaker). Only case 3. seems to be relevant for the EN minimizer sleep a wink. 2 OTHER does not include only positive contexts, but also misspellings, unclear cases, not the intended structure, etc. However, in the case of închide un ochi, an important contribution to the high percentage of OTHER is due to these positive cases. 3 Our corpus investigation was facilitated by the Sketch Engine tool that allows for elaborated filters and by the fact that we have additionally used Excel tables in order to semantically annotate and filter the relevant contexts for the examples analysed in this paper. Due to space limits, we cannot provide a detailed presentation of our methods for corpus-handling.

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Figure 4: Pie chart of the occurrence profile of închide un ochi with homonymous structures removed An interesting finding that should be further explored in search of more minimizer types is collocation with approximatives such as hardly, barely1, scarcely (“(de-) abia/aproape”): sleep a wink is attested with as much as 10% in the scope of such operators, which is also confirmed (even if with lower percentage) for the Romanian NPI. While this does not contravene to the theoretical model of the strong NPIs (Krifka 1995, for example, shows that strong NPIs can appear in the scope of weak licensers of this type), we have to check if this can be considered a typical, distinctive trait for certain minimizers (i.e. not being only marginally attested), which might lead to recategorization. 5. Conclusions and Future Work The facts revealed by the corpus investigation sustain some of the traits signalled by the initial profiles resulting from testing sleep a wink/închide un ochi in diagnostic (core) contexts: the highest preference for negative environments and the almost nonexistent attestation in the scope of weak operators such as few (as it appears in seven English corpora and in three Romanian corpora) strengthen the image of the two expressions as strong NPIs. The corpus also shows something new (i.e. not represented in the core contexts) about these minimizers: licensing in the scope of approximatives such as hardly, barely, scarcely (and their Romanian correspondents – abia/de-abia). This behaviour has also been reported by some theoretical studies as characterizing a number

1 For example, Horn 1995: 174 attests, in theory, minimizers such as sleep a wink/(touch) a drop in the scope of barely.

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of strong NPIs; however, it would be interesting to investigate if this trait can be considered as typical for some of the items currently grouped as strong NPIs. The hypothesis that sleep a wink/închide un ochi should be part of a distinct subclass of strong NPIs, i.e. presupposition neutral, since they co-occur with only, is not confirmed by the empirical profile generated in the second phase of our analysis (they might be marginally accepted in the scope of only, yet this is not their typical behaviour). Additionally, we did not find, at this stage, concluding evidence in corpora in order to verify if the collocation with episodic readings is a distinctive trait (the results of the tests performed on enTenTen13/roTenTen16 do not appear as quantitatively relevant, even if we did find a very limited attestation of sleep a wink in if-clauses that are acceptable under an episodic interpretation). Therefore, we intend to repeat the tests on more corpora. Moreover, we should also compare the results of corpus investigation with those of psycholinguistic experiments on native English/Romanian speakers. This might lead to clearer results. Our method that proposes testing NPI candidates initially in diagnostic environments, obtaining a primary profile, and then checking it against findings from corpus investigation and/or from experiments on speaker judgements has the benefit that it provides a classification even from the beginning (that might be challenged or improved afterwards); if we do not find other concluding information in the subsequent phase, this does not affect the characterization that we already have regarding a particular candidate. We intend to apply this method as a common standard for creating two-level profiles for more NPIs so that we obtain a more accurate characterization of their distributional patterns. References Eckardt, Regine, Eva Csipak, 2013, “Minimizers – Towards pragmatic licensing”. In Eva Csipak, Regine Eckardt, Mingya Liu, Manfred Sailer (eds.), Beyond 'Any' and 'Ever': New Explorations in Negative Polarity Sensitivity. vol. 262, Trends in Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, p. 267298. De Decker, Paul, Erik Larsson, Andrea Martin, 2005, Polarity Judgments: An Empirical View. https://philpapers.org/archive/DEDPJA.pdf Fauconnier, Giles, 1975, “Polarity and the Scale Principle”. In Papers from the Eleventh Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, p. 188–199. Giannakidou, Anastasia, 2006, “Only, emotive factive verbs and the dual nature of polarity dependency”. Language 82, p. 575-603. Heim, Irene, 1984, “A Note on Negative Polarity and Downward Entailingness”. In Charles Jones, Peter Sells (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 14, Amherst, p. 98-107. Hoeksema, Jack, 1997, “Corpus Study of Negative Polarity Items”. IV-V Jornades de Corpus Linguistics 1996-1997, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, p. 67-86. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hoeksema/docs/barcelona.html Hoeksema, Jack, 2013, “Polarity items in Strawsonian contexts: A comparison”. In Eva Csipak, Regine Eckardt, Mingya Liu, Manfred Sailer (eds.), Beyond 'Any' and 'Ever': New Explorations in Negative Polarity Sensitivity. vol. 262, Trends in Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, p. 4778.

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Horn, Laurence, 1996, “Exclusive company: Only and the dynamics of vertical inference”. Journal of Semantics 13, p. 1-40. Horn, Laurence, 2016, “Licensing NPIs: Some Negative (and Positive) Results”. In Pierre Larrivée, Chungmin Lee (eds.). Negation and polarity: Experimental perspectives, Cham: Springer, p. 281-305. Iordăchioaia, Gianina, 2010, Negative Concord with Negative Quantifiers: A Polyadic Quantifier Approach to Romanian Negative Concord. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Tübingen. Iordăchioaia, Gianina, Frank Richter, 2015, “Negative Concord with polyadic quantifiers. The case of Romanian”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 33 (2), p. 607-658. Israel, Michael, 1995, “Negative Polarity and Phantom Reference”. In Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Volume 21, Berkeley, p. 162-173. Israel, Michael, 1996, “Polarity Sensitivity as Lexical Semantics”. Linguistics and Philosophy 19, p. 619–666. Israel, Michael, 2004, “The pragmatics of polarity”. In Laurence Horn, Gregory Ward (eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, Malden, Blackwell, p. 701–723. Klima, Edward, 1964 “Negation in English”. In Jerry A. Fodor, Jerrold J. Katz (eds.), The Structure of Language. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Krifka, Manfred, 1995, “The semantics and pragmatics of polarity items”. Linguistic Analysis 25(3/4), p. 1-49. Ladusaw, Willam, 1980, Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope relations. New York: Garland Press. Liu, Mingya, Regine Eckardt, and Janina Radό, 2013, “Polarity in Context” In Eva Csipak, Regine Eckardt, Mingya Liu, Manfred Sailer (eds.), Beyond 'Any' and 'Ever': New Explorations in Negative Polarity Sensitivity. vol. 262, Trends in Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, p. 351368. Onea, Edgar and Manfred Sailer, 2013, “Really all that clear?” In Eva Csipak, Regine Eckardt, Mingya Liu, Manfred Sailer (eds.), Beyond 'Any' and 'Ever': New Explorations in Negative Polarity Sensitivity. vol. 262, Trends in Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, p. 332-350. Richter, Frank and Philip Soehn, 2006, “Braucht niemanden zu scheren: A survey of NPI licensing in German”. In Stefan Müller (ed.): Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on HPSG, Stanford: CSLI Publications, p. 421-440. Richter, Frank, Fabienne Fritzinger, Marion Weller, 2010, “Who Can See the Forest for the Trees? Extracting Multiword Negative Polarity Items from Dependency-Parsed Text”. Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics 25(1), p. 83-110. Rizea, Monica-Mihaela, Gianina Iordăchioaia, Frank Richter, 2016, “A Collocational Approach to Romanian Strong Negative Polarity Items”. In Maria Mitrofan, Daniela Gîfu, Dan Tufiș, Dan Cristea (eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference Linguistic Resources and Tools for Processing the Romanian Language, p.173-185. http://consilr.info.uaic.ro/2016/Consilr_2016.pdf Rullmann, Hotze, 2003, “Additive particles and polarity”. Journal of Semantics 20, p. 329–401. Sailer, Manfred, 2009a, “On reading-dependent licensing of strong NPIs”. In Arndt Riester, Torgrim Solstad (eds.). Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 13, Stuttgart, p. 455-468. Sailer, Manfred, 2009b, A representational theory of negative polarity item licensing. Habilitation thesis, University of Göttingen. Sedivy, Julie, 1990, “Against a unified analysis of negative polarity items”. In Cahiers Linguistiques d’Ottawa, 18, University of Ottawa, p. 72-90. van der Wal, Sjoukje, 1996, Negative polarity items and negation: Tandem acquisition. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Gröningen.

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van der Wouden, Ton, 1997, Negative contexts. Collocation, polarity and multiple negation. London and New York: Routledge. Zwarts, Frans, 1998, “Three types of polarity”. In Fritz Hamm, Erhard Hinrichs (eds.): Plurality and Quantification, Dordrecht: Kluwer, p. 177–238.

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CLOSER TO THE TRUTH? STRONG NEGATIVE POLARITY ITEMS BETWEEN CONTROLLED DIAGNOSTIC ENVIRONMENTS AND REAL-USE DISTRIBUTION PROFILES FROM LARGE CORPORA (Abstract) Starting from the collocational theory of NPI licensing (Sailer 2009 a and b), we present a two-step procedure for profiling individual NPIs: we test the NPI candidates in core diagnostic contexts and generate a theoretical profile; then, we verify the expectations corresponding to the theoretical profile against the empirical profile (in this study, we mainly considered the results of corpus investigation). In the best scenario, the results could lead to the identification of different distribution patterns than initially presumed and of more NPI types. We illustrate this procedure with a comparative analysis of the expression (licenser+) sleep a wink, which was expected to be presupposition neutral, and one of its Romanian correspondents, (licenser+) închide un ochi.

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