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.

KATIYEN as a common ground modifier in Turkish

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KATIYEN is classified as a negative polarity item that necessarily takes scope under clause-mate negation (Kelepir 2001) and subcategorized as a (super)strong-NPI that is licensed in antimorphic contexts (Görgülü 2017, following Zwarts 1995. I argue that KATIYEN has a dual use as a negative sensitive item and a degree modifier on the common ground.

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“…The same subset is also allowed in yes-no questions on the condition that the question particle -mI attaches to the predicate, thereby delivering the set of polar alternatives (see Kamalı 2022 for further discussion). ( 6 Based on the discussed licensing environments, Görgülü (2017) classifies katiyen, asla and sakın in (1c) within the (super)strong NPI group while the rest patterns with strong or weak NPIs depending on whether one accepts questions as downward-entailing (see Mayr 2013, Nicolae 2015.…”