Shravan Vasishth, Ohio State University
This is an empirical, questionnaire based pilot study of Hindi NPIs that examines van der Wouden's and others' claim that NPIs cross-linguistically exhibit sensitivity to antimorphicity (strong negative contexts), anti-additivity (medium negative contexts) and downward monotonicity (weak negative context). Using 89 informants of Hindi to provide judgements on NPI data, it emerges that although van der Wouden's claim is in principle correct, the nature of the sensitivity of Hindi NPIs to the above three kinds of licensing contexts differs significantly from the case in English and Dutch, among other languages. One conclusion this study reaches is that the stronger the negative context, the greater the tendency among speakers to affix the focus particles `bhii' and `tak', and the weaker the context, the greater the tendency for the NPI to appear without any focus particle.