A considerable amount of literature on NPIs has taken syntactic/semantic approaches to identify their licensing environments. However, adverb NPIs in Korean reveal their own idiosyncratic distributational behaviors which the previous analyses cannot explain. Their behaviors reflect the speaker`s different attitudes about the event/situation he is describing. So any appropriate theory of NPIs should be able to account for such pragmatic functions to predict their properties correctly. For this purpose, we classify adverb NPIs into 4 types according to their distributional behaviors in rhetorical questions, and we describe their pragmatic functions; this pragmatic analysis gives a good account of why the 4 types of Adverb NPIs show different distributions in different sentence constructions.

• Han Gyu Lee