Typology of NPIs in Korean: Variation and Licensing

Abstract

This paper examines typology of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in Korean, focusing on their distributional and licensing properties.

This paper first classifies various types of Korean NPIs in terms of their distributional properties, and then discusses licensing environments of each type of NPIs in terms of nonveridicality, extensively discussed in many previous studies (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 2002, 2011a, b, C. Lee 1996, 1999, C. Lee et al. 2000, inter alia). Although licensing environments of each type of NPIs are not uniform, licensing environments of morphologically complex NPIs appear to be more restricted antiveridical, whereas other types of NPIs are widely distributed in nonveridical contexts. This paper further examines a context that does not contain an apparent nonveridical licenser but permit an NPI, and argues that a few types of NPIs secondarily adopt a mechanism of ‘rescuing’ (Giannakidou 2006) that is pragmatically conditioned.