Time: Thursday, March 19, 2014, 5-30-7 Location: 32-D831 Speaker: Yimei Xiang (Harvard) Title: Exhaustification, Focus Structure, and NPI-licensing
It is well-known that NPI any must stay in DE contexts. However, any can also be licensed within the c- command domain of only. In particular, any part of the any-phrase can not be focused. Previous studies attribute the licensing effect in (1a) to the Strawson-DE condition. However, this condition has been argued to be neither necessary nor sufficient (Crnic 2011, Gajewski 2011). I will show how an exhaustification-based theory (Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1998, Chierchia 2013) captures the (anti-)licensing effects in (1a-c), and then discuss various potential syntactic theories (Rooth 1996, Wagner 2006 a.o.) for focus-association, so as to explain the ungrammaticality of (1d).
(1) a. Only JOHNF read any paper. b. *John only read ANYF paper. c. *John only read [any PAPER]F, (he didn’t read every book). d. *John only read any PAPERF, (he didn’t read any book).