Investigating syntactic effects in NPI illusions in Turkish

Abstract

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are licensed when they are within the scope of negation. Judgment and online reading tasks revealed that comprehenders may show illusory licensing effects in sentences in which the licensing negation is in a structurally illicit position as in *The bills that no senators voted for will ever become law. Here we investigate whether NPI illusions reported in earlier studies on Turkish would be replicated and whether such effects would differ depending on the syntactic position of the intrusive licensor, i.e. complement or adjunct clauses. With a speeded acceptability judgment and two self-paced reading tasks, we show that offline NPI illusions with complement clauses in Turkish are replicated and extend to sentences with adjunct clauses, but illusory effects are not observed in online reading tasks.