LICENSING OF NEGATIVE POLARITY ITEMS UNDER INVERSE SCOPE

Negative polarity items are licensed 'in the scope' of their trigger. In this article, I take a closer look at the relevant notion of scope, which is shown to involve syntactic, semantic and pragmatic considera tions. In general, a position in the c-command domain of its trigger a t S-structure is sufficient for an NPI to be licensed. If the NPI prec edes its trigger, the sentence is felicitous only if the NPI can be in terpreted in the semantic scope of its trigger. The possibility of an inverse scope reading of negation is subject to a pragmatic constraint , which requires the sentence to convey positive information. The inca pability of bare NPIs involving any in English or ook maar in Dutch to satisfy this constraint explains why they cannot precede their trigge r. Embedded NPIs and the NPI hoeven 'need to' in Dutch can satisfy the pragmatic constraint on inverse scope, and are therefore licensed out side of the c-command domain of the trigger.