Negative Polarity Item refers to some language structures which are limited by negative contexts. It could be found in many languages and applied in different parts within a sentence. Since 1980s, Negative Polarity Item has attracted wide attentions from home and abroad, which includes research on Negative Polarity Item's syntax, semantics, pragmatics and etc. By analyzing the studies of Negative Polarity Item from the past 6 decades, this article finds that there is still debate on its concept, category, licensing mechanism, pragmatics functions, while deeper and fully researched studies are expected to be done in the future.
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