Utrecht Theoretical Linguistics

Events

30 January 2024
11:00 - 12:00
Janskerkhof 13, room 006/ Teams

ELITU talk: Lisa Bylinina, Yasu Sado and Stavroula Alexandropoulou

The next ELITU talk will be delivered by Lisa Bylinina, Yasu Sado and Stavroula Alexandropoulou on the 30th of January. The title of the talk will be Priming acceptability judgments of NPIs.

Abstract

We report on a series of priming experiments whose results indicate that (i) acceptability judgments of the Negative Polarity Item (NPI) ‘any’ can be primed, but (ii) only unacceptable sentences of the same type, i.e., those that contain unlincensed ‘any’, trigger priming effects. While these findings on their own have only indirect implications on theories of NPI licensing, we argue that our paradigm has methodological importance, offering a novel way of directly testing theoretical predictions. We will illustrate this with the so-called NPI bagel problem and present preliminary priming results on Russian NPIs.

All invited!

Teams link

Meeting ID: 354 938 000 328

Passcode: GtunRG