Negative polarity in Turkish: from negation to nonveridicality

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the Turkish negative polarity items (NPIs henceforth) and the nature of various contexts in which they are licensed. Based on new data, it is shown that NPIs in Turkish are not only licensed by sentential negation and yes/no questions, they also appear in protasis of conditionals and along with the adjectival suffix –sIz ‘without’. It is argued that the traditional views treating NPIs as appearing only with negation or in downward entailing environments (Fauconnier, 1978; Ladusaw, 1980, 1996), or proposing a hierarchy of NPIs purely based on negation (van der Wouden, 1997; Zwarts, 1996) do not fully capture the distribution of the NPIs in the language. Instead, I propose that a more exhaustive analysis which subsumes negation and questions under its paradigm is provided by adopting the semantic notion of nonveridicality (Giannakidou, 1998, 2002, 2011) where the truth conditions of the proposition in which NPIs appear is not entailed.