Jeremy Kuhn: Diachrony and polysemy of Negative polarity items: An artificial grammar study

Jeremy Kuhn: Diachrony and polysemy of Negative polarity items: An artificial grammar study

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are words that are only grammatical in certain negative contexts. Two well known diachronic patterns involve NPIs. First is Jespersen’s cycle: an NPI appearing in the scope of negation is reanalyzed as itself the marker of negation. Second, many NPIs in English also have a secondary positive use, with a systematic semantic relation to the negative use: in each case, the meaning of the positive form is the logical dual of the NPI. The present study investigates these meaning changes using an artificial language learning paradigm, where learners are trained on ambiguous input, and must generalize beyond this input. We ask which generalization strategies appear when learners have to interpret NPIs in a positive environment.

Watch the talk via Teams:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ODE1ZTk3MzEtODM4ZC00ZmFiLTkwYjMtNzQ5NTNmMmJiYTIz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22d72758a0-a446-4e0f-a0aa-4bf95a4a10e7%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2283c475af-f9dc-4c5e-80f5-e3f3e2e17adc%22%7d

Meeting ID: 317 985 190 492
Passcode: UHiWKa