A path of grammatical change from weak NPIs to strong NPIs in Shuri Okinawan and Bul`ı

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v11i1.6098

Keywords:

negative polarity item, NPI, negative concord item, NCI, negation, grammatical change, Shuri Okinawan, Ryukyuan, Buli, Gur, Mabia

Abstract

No languages remain unchanged. Syntax, semantics, and phonology are all subject to change, and NPIs are no exception. We report our new discovery of an ongoing grammatical change between two types of NPIs, from weak NPIs (Grammar A) to strong NPIs (Grammar B), in two unrelated endangered languages, Okinawan (spoken on the main island of Shuri Okinawa, Japan) and Buli  (a Mabia/Gur language spoken in Northern Ghana). We put forth a tentative hypothesis that this change is being driven by computational simplicity.

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Published

2026-05-08

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 1 (2026): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2026 Ken Hiraiwa, Abdul-Razak Sulemana

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Hiraiwa, Ken, and Abdul-Razak Sulemana. 2026. “A Path of Grammatical Change from Weak NPIs to Strong NPIs in Shuri Okinawan and Bul`ı”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 11 (1): 6098. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v11i1.6098.