Dutch ENIG:from nonveridicality to downward entailment

In combinations with singular count nouns, the Dutch indefinite determiner enig 'some/any' shows a diachronic distributional shift from nonveridical environments in general to a strict subset thereof, namely negative, conditional and interrogative contexts. Similarities with Greek indefinites of the kanenas-series are explored, and an argument is given that at some point enig has split into two uses, one of which is currently on its way out. Nonemphatic, nonreferring enig is disappearing, whereas emphatic enig is stable within a set of environments similar to those of English any or ever

Minimizers in Azerbaijani from a comparative perspective

Azerbaijani, like many other languages, has a class of negative polarity items denoting minimal measures (along dimensions such as size, length, duration, value, weight etc.), called minimizers. This paper presents an overview of this group of expressions, compares them to minimizers in the western European languages, in particular English and Dutch, identifies the various domains in which these minimizers may be used, and discusses their distribution across polarity-sensitive contexts such as negation, conditional clauses, questions, etc. The distribution we found, on the basis of both corpus data and native speaker judgments, is very similar to that of minimizers in English or Dutch, especially when differences are factored out which are due to the fact that Azerbaijani has strict negative concord, whereas English and Dutch do not. To this end, we distinguish two types of minimizers for Azerbaijani, negated minimizers preceded by heç bir ‘not one’, and minimizers preceded by bir only