NPIs Pragmatically

Some contexts are more obviously downward entailing than others. Thus, it is clear that the negation in (1a) creates a DE context, but it is not quite as clear that the if in (1c) does. Moreover, some NPIs only like certain kinds of DE contexts and which ones occur in which contexts is an interesting question which has received considerable attention in the literature. We would like to abstract away from these issues here, however, and address another one: Why should NPIs be limited to semantically negative contexts, contexts that invert the direction of entailment (Fauconnier 1975)? Recent analyses attempt to answer this question by exploiting the semantics of NPIs (cf. Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1998, Chierchia 2006). We argue that while the distributional restrictions of NPIs are indeed related to their meanings, the distributional restriction of NPIs cannot be derived from for their meanings.