Nominal negative quantifiers as adjuncts

Abstract The topic of the following article is an exceptional use of the negative quantifier nothing and its correspondents in German, Dutch and Italian in which this element turns out to act like a negative polarity item (NPI). The circumstances under which this is the case have very briefly been described in Bayer (2006). Nothing is interpreted like an NPI whenever it is not licensed as an argument. Closer inspection reveals that adjunct status alone is too coarse a distinction, and that nothing must in fact be associated with the structural object position of the verb. The article is organi... Mehr ...