Mandarin SHENME as a superweak NPI

In the past thirty years, Frans Zwarts has written several papers providing crucial insight in licensing contexts for Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), presenting a more nuanced picture than Ladusaw’s (1979) downward entailing (DE) requirement. Zwarts demonstrated (1981) that a number of Dutch NPIs appear only in a subset of DE-contexts, and proposed (1995) non-veridicality as a logico-semantic property that licenses so-called superweak NPIs. Such superweak NPIs, however, have hardly been attested. We show that Mandarin shenme (‘a (thing)’) is a prototypical superweak NPI. We explain its ungrammaticality in veridical contexts by arguing that shenme exhibits a lexical referential deficiency. Acquisitional data, furthermore, suggest that children initially analyze shenme as a WH-quantifier but acquire the referential deficiency underlying its NPI status after the age of four.