On the negative polarity sensitive indefinite determiner nakar

• Main Authors: Kristine Bentzen, Caroline Heycock, Jógvan Í Lon Jacobsen, Janne Bondi Johannessen, Jeffrey K. Parrott, Tania E. Strahan, Øystein Alex, Er Vangsnes, Arne Martinus Lindstad
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Faroe Islands
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.551.8450; http://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/nordlyd/article/viewFile/233/223/

This paper reports on fieldwork undertaken during the NORMS dialect workshop in the Faroe Islands in August 2008. I present and discuss findings from a questionnaire study of the negative polarity sensitive indefinite determiner nakar ‘any. ’ The questionnaire was constructed on the basis of the findings in Lindstad (1999) for the Norwegian polarity sensitive determiner noen ‘any’. The results indicate that Faroese nakar has a distribution that by and large mimics that of noen. This distribution is also very similar to that of Danish nogen ‘any ’ and Icelandic nokkur ‘any, ’ but differs considerably from Swedish någon ‘any. ’ I did not find any dialectal variation in the distribution of nakar across licensing contexts, only minor variation at the individual level. 1. Introduction1 Polarity sensitivity, and in particular the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), has been a fruitful field for the study of the syntax-semantics interface at least since Klima (1964). A polarity item is a lexical item with