Lisa Bylinina, Yasu Sudo and Stavroula Alexandropoulou: Priming acceptability judgments of NPIs

Lisa Bylinina, Yasu Sudo and Stavroula Alexandropoulou

Priming acceptability judgments of NPIs

We report on a series of priming experiments whose results indicate that (i) acceptability judgments of the Negative Polarity Item (NPI) ‘any’ can be primed, but (ii) only unacceptable sentences of the same type, i.e., those that contain unlincensed ‘any’, trigger priming effects. While these findings on their own have only indirect implications on theories of NPI licensing, we argue that our paradigm has methodological importance, offering a novel way of directly testing theoretical predictions. We will illustrate this with the so-called NPI bagel problem and present preliminary priming results on Russian NPIs.

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