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The present paper investigates the contexts in which the so-called
n-words - the items which are taken to be Negative Polarity Items in
Slavic languages - unexpectedly occur without a licensing negation
marker on the verb. This particular usage of n-words seems to point
towards an ambiguous behaviour of the items in question: in an
antimorphic contexts they are NPIs; otherwise they are negative
quantifiers with negation having narrow scope w.r.t. the event
variable. The paper tries to answer the question why the latter use is
restricted to certain adverbials. I argue that the availability of
'logophoric' n-words turns on the issue of what the adverbial PP is
predicated of. This intuition is formalized using Higginbothamistic
view on l-(exical) syntax, where the nature of $\Theta$-identification
of the adverbial with the verb is of fundamental importance. The
semantic requirement, however, turns out to be insufficient. Hence the
syntactic position of the PP on the hierarchy of thematic roles also
has to be taken into consideration. The data analysed include
adverbials of manner, reason, time, place, direction, resultatives and
depictives.