Elena Guerzoni and Yael Sharvit. “A Question of Strength: On NPIs in Interrogative Clauses”. ms.

Abstract: We observe that the facts pertaining to the acceptability of negative polarity items (henceforth, NPIs) in interrogative environments are more complex than previously noted. While it has been typically assumed ever since Klima (1964) that NPIs are grammatical in both matrix and embedded questions, on closer scrutiny it turns out that there is a difference between root and embedded environments. While NPIs are always licensed in root questions, their acceptability in embedded questions depends on the logical properties of the embedding predicate: its strength in terms of exhaustivity (cf. Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984, Heim 1994, Beck and Rullmann 1999, and Sharvit 2002) and its monotonicity properties (in the sense of von Fintel 1999).