The Two Kinds of Japanese Negative Nai in Terms of Their NPI Licensing Conditions

Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC12), 18-20 Feb, 1998, 69-81 THE TWO KINDS OF JAPANESE NEGATIVE Nai IN TERMS OF THEIR NPI LICENSING CONDITIONS Akira IKEYA�Masahito KAWAMORI Toyo Gakuen University� ikeyaOyk.rim.or.jp�NTT Basic Research Labs. kawamoriCatom.brl.ntt.co.jp Abstract Traditionally, Japanese is said to have two kinds of negative word nai, meaning 'not' in English: the nai occurring after a verb or adjective and the nai with an independent status as a word. In contrast to traditional Japanese linguistics, most generative studies of Japanese have made no such distinction but rather focused their attention on such issues as the interaction between a scope of negation and a quantifier and the behavior of negative polarity items. In this paper we attempt to integrate all the proposals of each position by making use of both syntactic and semantic features. We also claim that the independent nai has a distinctly adjectival status with regard to its* semantic structure. 1 Introduction The Japanese language has two kinds of negative word nai meaning 'not' in English: one is the nai occurring after a verb or adjective and the other is the nai which has an independent status as a word. The example of the latter is: (1) Kokoni ringo wa nai here apple Nom not Here is no apple. which is the negation of: (2) Kokoni ringo ga aru here� apple Nom is Here is an apple. The former is exemplified by the sentence: (3) watashi wa� ringo o� tabe-nai I�Nom apple Obj eat not I do not eat an apple. where tabe-nai is the negation of the verb taberu (eat), and the following: (4) Kono hon wa omoshiroku-nai this book Nom interesting not This book is not interesting. where omoshiroku-nai is the negation of the adjective omoshiroi. While the traditional Japanese linguistics has generally treated the independent nai as an adjec- tive, it regarded the nai which occurs after a verb as an auxiliary and the nai which occurs after an adjective as an adjective. Hattori (1950) raised a question as to this distinction and proposed to use 69 Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC12), 18-20 Feb, 1998, 69-81 a category-neutral term. He called the nai after a verb fuzoku-keishiki (dependent form) while he called the one after an adjective fuzoku-go (dependent word). In a strong contrast to traditional Japanese linguistics, almost all the studies in generative gram- mar have made no distinction between the nai occurring after a verb or an adjective with no indepen- dent status, and the nai having an independent status by giving a unified name NEG whose syntactic or semantic status is left unspecified. They have focused their attention on the interaction between a scope of negation and a quantifier or the issue of the behavior of negative polarity items. In this paper we attempt to integrate all the proposals , of each position by making use of both syntactic and semantic features. Moreover, it is our main claim that the independent nai has a distinctly adjectival status in terms of a semantic structure …

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