Why Can't "Any" Go Just Anywhere? NPIs

Why can't we just use "ever" or "at all" in any sentence we want? What do we have to change about how a sentence works to let words like those in? In this week's episode, we talk about negative polarity items, or NPIs: when they can show up, why their name is misleading, and how changing what a sentence entails changes everything for these little terms.

This is Topic #74!

This week's tag language: Khmer!

Related episodes:
Clues to Meaning: Implicatures, Entailments, and Presuppositions -    • Implicatures, Entailments, and Presup...  
Let's Talk about Sets: Set Theory and Adjectives -    • How Do We Build Meaning with Math? Se...  
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers -    • What Does "Most" Even Mean? Generaliz...  

Last episode:
So Many Meanings, So Little Time: Ambiguities -    • Why Are There So Many Meanings? Ambig...  

Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Sheepish Semantics: The Lambda Calculus -    • How Can One Greek Letter Help Us Unde...  
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory -    • How Do We Decide What's Relevant in O...  
Building Common Ground -    • How Do We Create a Shared World in Co...  

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Sources:
Most of the information for this episode comes from Anders Schoubye's lecture notes, Formal Semantics for Philosophers:
http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-S...

See you all in two weeks!