Abstract
It is commonly believed that Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in Japanese must be c-commanded by a sentential negation marker in the same local domain. The book under review challenges this common belief, taking up three kinds of NPIs (rokuna-, sika- and wh-mo-NPIs), and claims that the latter two must occur outside the scope of negation. The present paper reviews this claim and points out a couple of problems from the viewpoint of where negation is expressed in a sentence with an NPI. It will be shown that rokuna- and sika-NPIs, unlike wh-rao-NPIs, constitute a semantic locus of negation, hence a different grouping emerges. A solution will be suggested to reconcile this apparent contradiction.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 528-549 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | English Linguistics |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |
Keywords
- ellipsis
- negation
- negative polarity items
- scope
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language