TY - JOUR AU - Drenhaus, Heiner AU - Błaszczak, Joanna AU - Sch¨utte, Juliane PY - 2019/08/07 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Some psycholinguistic comments on NPI licensing JF - Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung JA - SuB VL - 11 IS - 0 SE - Articles DO - 10.18148/sub/2007.v11i0.639 UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/639 SP - 180-193 AB - <p>In this paper, we discuss the relevance of c-command and licensing strength for NPI licensing. Furthermore, we review the results of an experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which we investigated the difference in strength of licensing the German negative polarity item <em>jemals</em> ’ever’. The two licensing contexts under discussion are negation and wh-question. We found a sustained negativity on the Negative polarity item (NPI) in wh-context compared to the context where the NPI appeared in the scope of negation. We discuss our ERP results in the light of some recent theoretical proposals on negative polarity licensing.</p> ER -