36.1829, Confs: Approaches to NPIs and their licensing conditions – Anything new? (DGfS 2026 Workshop) (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1829. Wed Jun 11 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1829, Confs: Approaches to NPIs and their licensing conditions – Anything new? (DGfS 2026 Workshop) (Germany)

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Date: 11-Jun-2025
From: Carolin Reinert [reinert at lingua.uni-frankfurt.de]
Subject: Approaches to NPIs and their licensing conditions – Anything new? (DGfS 2026 Workshop)


Approaches to NPIs and their licensing conditions – Anything new?
(DGfS 2026 Workshop)
Short Title: DGfS 2026 NPI AG

Date: 24-Feb-2026 - 27-Feb-2026
Location: Trier, Germany
Contact: Carolin Reinert
Contact Email: reinert at lingua.uni-frankfurt.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 21-Jul-2025

Organizers: Carolin Reinert and Farbod Khouzani (Goethe University)
This short workshop is organized as part of the 48th Annual Conference
of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS2026).
Workshop Description:
Negative polarity items (NPIs) and their licensing conditions have
long been the subject of extensive research. The fact that NPIs
display certain distributional similarities and differences at the
same time is a discernible pattern across languages. There have been
several attempts to account for the heterogeneous distribution of NPIs
by referring to syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic properties of the
contexts containing them (Buyssens 1959, Ladusaw 1979, von Bergen &
von Bergen 1993, Krifka 1995, van der Wouden 1997, Zwarts 1998,
Zeijlstra 2004, Hoeksema 2012, Sailer 2021 among others). While there
appears to be more or less consensus on the ability of specific
contexts (e.g., sentential negation, conditional clauses) to license
NPIs, other contexts (e.g., interrogatives, consecutive clauses) have
caused more controversy. Crosslinguistically, the distributional
patterns diverge. For instance, only negation can license the English
NPI yet, whereas the NPI ever can additionally be licensed by
interrogatives and many other downward entailing contexts. In
contrast, the German semantic equivalent je(mals) (`ever`) cannot be
licensed by clause-mate sentential negation, and others like
irgendwann (`sometime/ever`) and noch (`still/yet`) are not even NPIs.
For these reasons, it seems difficult to clearly define a unified and
cross-linguistically applicable notion of NPI and NPI licensing
conditions.
In this working group, we therefore wish to provide a platform for
researchers from all career stages to share and discuss new findings
(e.g., from synchronic and diachronic corpus research, different
experimental methodologies, fieldwork, and research on language
acquisition) on the following questions:
1. Can NPIs and their distribution be predicted uniformly and
cross-linguistically, or must NPIs be considered individual
descriptive phenomena, each with unique characteristics?
2. How do syntax, semantics, or even pragmatics play a role in NPI
licensing?
3. Is NPI licensing only a matter of negativity (often captured in
terms of downward entailment, e.g., Ladusaw 1979), or are other
factors (such as scalarity, e.g., Israel 2011) also involved?
4. Are the crucial properties, whatever they may be, structured
hierarchically (Zwarts 1998, Hoeksema 2012 among others), or do they
have an idiosyncratic distribution?
We invite submissions that address these and/or related questions.
Invited Speakers:
 - Manfred Sailer (Goethe Universität Frankfurt)
 - Jack Hoeksema (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Workshop Format:
30-minute talks (20 min. presentation + 10 min. discussion) in
English. Presenters must
register for the conference, and in accordance with DGfS regulations,
each presenter is allowed to give a talk at only one of the DGfS
workshops.
Submission Details:
Abstracts must include the names of the authors and their
affiliations. They must not exceed 1 page (A4, 12pt, single-space).
Graphs, tables and references may be included on a second page.
Please send your abstract electronically in PDF format by July 21,
2025 to both reinert at lingua.uni-frankfurt.de and
farbod.khouzani at em.uni-frankfurt.de.
Important Dates:
Abstract submission deadline: July 21, 2025
Notification of acceptance: due end of August 2025
More information on DGfS2026 can be found at:
https://www.uni-trier.de/en/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-ii/forschung-und-zentren/dgfs2026



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