Abstract
It has been a long-standing puzzle that Negative Polarity Items appear to split into two subvarieties when their effect on the interpretation of questions is taken into account: while questions with any and ever can be used as unbiased requests of information, questions with so-called `minimizers', i.e. idioms like lift a finger and the faintest idea, are always biased towards a negative answer (cf. Ladusaw 1979). Focusing on yes/no questions, this paper presents a solution to this puzzle. Specifically it is shown that in virtue of containing even (cf. Heim 1984), minimizers, unlike any, trigger a presupposition, which reduces the set of the possible answers to a question to the singleton containing the negative answer.
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Guerzoni, E. Even-NPIs in YES/NO Questions. Natural Language Semantics 12, 319–343 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-004-8739-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-004-8739-0