On question exhaustivity and NPI licensing

Abstract

Guerzoni and Sharvit (2007) discovered that the licensing of weak negative polarity items (NPIs) by embedded questions requires a (strongly) exhaustive interpretation in the sense of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1982). This paper points out that under the view that wh-questions themselves are ambiguous between exhaustive and non-exhaustive meanings (George 2011, Guerzoni and Sharvit 2014, Nicolae 2015, Theiler et al. 2016), Guerzoni and Sharvit’s observation falls out from an analysis of NPI licensing by questions developed in Krifka (1995) and van Rooy (2003), an analysis that construes questions’ strength as their information theoretic entropy (Shannon 1948). Restrictions on NPIs in disjunctive questions (Schwarz in press) and singular which-questions are presented as further support for the account.