文摘
The paper is devoted to Russian NPI (Negative Polarity Item) pronouns, namely, to the pronominal series on -libo (kakoj-libo, ?to-libo, etc.), which was treated as a NPI in several papers, and to the series on by to ni bylo (kakoj by to ni bylo, etc.), which up till now was not recognized as belonging to the NPI-class. NPI-pronouns are compared with non-specific indefinite pronouns (NSI pronouns), i.e. with the pronominal series on -nibud-/em> (kakoj-nibud-/em>, ?to-nibud-/em>, etc.). The set of contexts licensing NPI presents a riddle: in many different languages NPIs are licensed not only by negative contexts but also by the context of condition, question and some others. In a series of papers by A.?Giannakidou the idea is developed that the set of contexts licensing NPI is covered by the notion ‘nonveridicality-(nonveridical?≈?without regard to the truth, non-referential). Yet, it turns out that in Russian nonveridicality of a proposition constitutes a licensing context for NS-pronouns, while NPIs are at place only in a small subset of these contexts—in negative contexts and those adjacent to them; for example, YES-NO-questions license NPIs, while WH-questions don’t. Attention is paid to the fact that the notion of nonveridicality, which emerged in the framework of formal semantics in the late 90s, is related to the notion of ‘suspended assertion- which was introduced by U. Weinreich in 1963 and has since then been widely used in Russian explicative (≈?cognitive) linguistics.