Negation height and NPI licensing in Jordanian Arabic: Experimental support for an agree-based account

This paper presents the first experimental investigation of licensing of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in Jordanian Arabic (JA). NPIs are expressions that are restricted to non-affirmative environments such as negation and other nonveridical contexts. JA is an ideal testing ground because it employs two structurally distinct negation strategies: a high clausal negator mā and a bipartite low negation ma–V–š . We report two offline experiments, a 7-point acceptability judgment task and a forced-choice interpretation task, crossing NPI position (preverbal vs. postverbal) with negation type (high vs. bipartite). The results reveal a robust interaction: preverbal NPIs are licensed only under high mā , while postverbal NPIs are licensed only under bipartite ma–V–š . Since both negators create equally nonveridical environments, the asymmetry cannot be reduced to semantic weakness. Instead, it follows from structural licensing: mā occupies a high Neg head above TP, ma–V–š realizes a single low Neg head under T, and NPIs are licensed accordingly, with adverbial ʕumr (‘ever’) requiring a high licensor and walā ḥada (‘anyone’) belonging to a low concord system. Licensing therefore reduces to Agree between iNEG and uNEG features under c-command. These findings provide experimental confirmation for feature-based syntactic analyses of polarity (Zeijlstra, 2004; Bjorkman postverbal NPIs with ma –V– š. • Findings support a structure-based (Agree) account of polarity. • Two tasks (ratings, interpretations) show the same robust interaction.