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Abstract:
In the linguistic literature, most accounts agree
that polarity items must occur in a licensing domain in which the
licensing conditions are accessible, where accessibility is
determined by the hierarchical constituency rather than linear
accessibility. As a general consequence, spurious potential
licensers that are linearly near the polarity item play no role
in the construction, see (13).
(1) NO applicant who a member praised
was EVER admitted to the club.
(2) *An applicant who NO member praised
was EVER admitted to the club.
(3) An applicant who NO member praised
was OFTEN admitted to the club.
From the processing point of view this raises
interesting questions regarding the contributions of syntactic
and semantic constituency and their influence on potential
intrusion effects during processing. Polarity items are not
predicted by the presence of a potential licensing element, they
can be easily replaced with a non-polarity sensitive adverbial
(3). Similarly, the word category of an unlicensed polarity
item is well formed; the failure in (2) is one of licensing not
that an adverbial cannot occur at that point in the string.
Thus at the point of detection of a polarity item the syntactic
parse is always well formed but the semantic properties of the
construction must be checked.
In a series of ERP and speeded judgment studies,
we investigated the processing of both negative (NPCs) and
positive (PPCs) polarity constructions in German focusing on the
effect of the structural and linear position of negation.
In the construction of materials we limited ourselves to simple
licensing by overt negation in the case of NPCs involving
'jemals' (English 'ever') and the absence of negation for PPCs
involving 'durchaus' (English 'certainly').
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(4)
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Kein / Ein Mann, der einen /
keinen Bart hatte, war jemals / durchaus froh.
No / a man, that a / no beard had, was ever / certainly
happy.
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The ERP data revealed contrastive behaviour that
was sensitive to both the type of polarity item and the presence
of intrusion. Violations of NPCs produced an N400 component
whereas violations of PPCs produced an N400P600 pattern. In
addition, intrusion effects were found in both ERP and judgments
when negation occurred in the relative clause. In the case
of NPCs, which in our study were ungrammatical when negation was
trapped within the relative clause, the N400 was weakened.
In the case PPCs, which in our study were grammatical when
negation is trapped within the relative clause, a weaker P600 was
elicited.
An account of the checking relation induced by the
polarity items must explain the following:
(a) The basic grammaticality effects for both NPCs
and PPCs
(b) The contrast in the grammaticality effects for
both NPCs versus PPCs
(c) That intrusion occurs in both grammatical and
ungrammatical strings
(d) That intrusion affects different processes in
both types of polarity items
We interpret these findings as support for a
mechanism that involves the coupling of the computation of
hierarchical constituency with an independent working memory or
reactivation process.
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