Licensing Conditions for Weak and Strong NPIs

The present study aims to present different licensing conditions for negative polarity items (NPIs) of the weak, strong, and superstrong types. Zwarts (1998) offered monotone decreasing, anti-additive, and antimorphic functions as licensing conditions for weak, strong, and superstrong NPIs respectively. Giannakidou (2006) argued that nonveridicality and antiveridicality were licensing conditions for weak and strong NPIs respectively. Gajewski (2011) claimed that while both strong and weak NPIs are licensed in a downward entailing environment, only the former are sensitive to the non-truth conditional meaning of licensers. This paper argues that negation is the sole NPI licenser and that the degree of negation of each licenser determines its licensing ability: complete explicit negation can license all three types of NPIs; approximate explicit negation can license strong and weak NPIs; implicit negation can license weak NPIs and partially license minimizers; and half negation can license only weak NPIs. The present study also deals with the problem of overgeneration with regard to implicit and half negation.