Accepted 26^th October, 2021
 

Lifang Zhang² and Wencheng Gao<sup>1*

1</sup>College of Foreign Languages, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China.
²College of Foreign Languages, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China.
 

Negation is crucial to semantics. Negative polarity items (NPI) play an important role in negation. We investigate the variety of negative polarity items which can be allowed in Chinese ESs and their licensing conditions. It is found that four types of negative polarity items can occur in Chinese ESs, that is, negative polarity adjectives, negative polarity adverbs, negative polarity wh-words, and negative polarity ‘one’ phrase as minimizer. In this study, we focus on the first two types of negative polarity items that can occur in Chinese ESs. The linguistic facts show that negative polarity adjectives in Chinese ESs can be licensed by negative sentences, yes-no interrogative sentences, A-not-A interrogative sentences, and the antecedent clause of a conditional while negative polarity adverb in Chinese ESs can only be licensed by negative sentences. We claim that negative polarity adjectives in Chinese ESs are strong NPIs while negative polarity adverbs remain weak NPIs. According to previous studies, it is often concluded that NPIs in Chinese are in general licensed by negative sentences. However, in our study we find that NPIs in Chinese ESs can also be licensed by other three types of sentences, that is, yes-no interrogative sentences, A-not-A interrogative sentences, and the antecedent clause of a conditional, as well as negative sentences. These are our new findings concerning NPIs in Chinese.

Key words: Negative polarity items, Chinese existential sentences, distribution, licensing condition.