Processing polarity items: Contrastive licensing costs

Formal Neurosemantics. Logic, meaning and composition in the Brain

“…This contrast is usually due to a difficult contextual integration, unexpected continuation, low lexical association between the trigger word and the preceding material and implausible meaning (Kutas & Federmeier, 2000;Kutas, Van Petten, & Kluender, 2006). Though, as also pointed out by Saddy et al (2004), the kind of deviance produced by NPI violations is rather different from that induced by semantic/pragmatic implausibility, and this idea is clearly supported by the fact that sentences like (13b) sound completely ungrammatical rather than semantically odd. One straightforward way to account for these findings is to explain the N400 effects under the hypothesis that NPI violations implicate a semantic incongruency (Chierchia, 2006;Krifka, 1995).…”

“…In the last five years several experimental studies (Drenhaus, Graben, Saddy, & Frisch, 2006;Saddy, Drenhaus, & Frisch, 2004;Xiang, Dillon, & Phillips, 2008) were conducted to investigate the reaction of the human brain to NPI violations, which are sentences such as (13b) in which an NPI occurs in a nonlicensing context. Additionally, other studies (Drenhaus, Blaszczak & Schütte, 2007;Vespignani, Panizza, Zandomeneghi & Job, 2009;cf.…”

“…*A man who a beard had was ever happy (Drenhaus et al, 2006;Saddy et al, 2004) N400, (P600) (16) *Most restaurants that the local newspapers have recommended in their dining reviews have ever gone out of business. (Xiang et al, 2008) P600 (17) *Sul giornale si legge che il presidente ha mai avuto un'amante.…”

A Verbal Illusion: Now in Three Languages

“…Semantic anomalies or incongruences, such as *He spread the warm bread with socks [Verb-Object incongruity], *The shiny scissors fired the burly coach [Subject-Verb incongruity], or *Some man was ever happy [unlicensed polarity item], elicit an N400, an electrophysiological effect at the incongruous word measured using electrodes on the scalp (Drenhaus et al 2006;Friederici 2002;Kutas and Hillyard 1980;Osterhout et al 1994;Prior and Bentin 2006;Saddy et al 2004). The size (amplitude) of the N400 is standardly taken to reflect degree of semantic fit or integration cost.…”

Spotting, collecting and documenting negative polarity items

“…e.g. Drenhaus et al 2004;Saddy et al 2004;Vasishth et al 2006) seem to be very promising ways to get insights about subclasses of NPIs and their interaction. A further refinement of our Spotting algorithm may be done by using a corpus which is word-sense tagged or which contains Information about different word uses (cf.…”