Negation, focus, and negative concord in Japanese

Abstract

This paper attempts to derive the syntactic distribution and the semantic interpretation of negative concord items in Japanese through morphosyntactic decomposition of them and semantic examination of each ingredient. In search for morphological makeup of negative concord items in Japanese, this investigation looks into the corresponding items in other languages that have transparent morphology such as Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian as well as negative polarity items in Hindi. It will be shown that while negative polarity items consist of a focus element and an indefinite viewed as a cardinality predicate one (Lahiri 1998), negative concord items minimally differ from negative polarity items in that they carry a negative element, which requires the presence of clausemate sentential negation to ensure interpretability at LF. When a negative concord item occurs with clausemate sentential negation, the Neg-feature of the former will get deleted, and the resultant object will become equivalent to negative polarity items.