Experimental evidence for neg-raising in Slavic

Abstract

Most research studying neg-raising focuses on English. Two notable exceptions are Bošković & Gajewski (2009) and Dočekal (2014) who discuss neg-raising in Slavic. In contrast to Bošković & Gajewski (2009), Dočekal (2014) argues that predicates of intention and obligation pass standard tests for neg-raisers in Czech. This article discusses new experimental data that provide additional evidence for the existence of negraising in Slavic languages, in particular, in Czech. The experiment that is conducted to test neg-raising predicates consists of an acceptability judgment task and an inference task. Sixty native speakers of Czech participated in the study. The results of the experiment are interpreted in Romoli’s scalar theory of neg-raising (Romoli 2012, 2013). We claim that neg-raising exists in Czech, and argue that strict negative polarity items are more acceptable under neg-raising predicates than under non-neg-raising predicates.

Keywords

• formal semantics
• implicatures
• neg-raising
• Slavic
• Czech