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The current version (December 2025) of the workshop program can be found below and here.
Organizers: Carolin Reinert and Farbod Khouzani (Goethe University)
Date: February 26–27, 2026
Location: Trier University, Germany
This short workshop is organized as part of the 48th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2026, February 24-27).
Invited speakers:
Manfred Sailer (Goethe Universität Frankfurt)
Jack Hoeksema (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Call for Papers/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 crosslinguistically 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:
Can NPIs and their distribution be predicted uniformly and cross-linguistically, or must NPIs be considered individual descriptive phenomena, each with unique characteristics?
How do syntax, semantics, or even pragmatics play a role in NPI licensing?
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?
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.
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@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de and farbod.khouzani@em.uni-frankfurt.de.
Important dates:
Abstract submission deadline: July 21, 2025
Notification of acceptance: due end of August 2025
More information on DGfS 2026 can be found at:
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