Japanese Indeterminate Negative Polarity Items and Their Scope

Abstract

This article investigates scopal properties of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Japanese that are composed of so-called indeterminate pronouns and particle -mo, such as dare-mo ‘who-MO’ and dore-mo ‘which-MO’. Contrary to a commonly held view, data are presented that show that the availability of the universal interpretation of indeterminate NPIs needs to be recognized. Due to the limited licensing environment of these NPIs, which require clausemate sentential negation, a difficulty arises in teasing apart predictions made by a narrow-scope existential analysis and a wide-scope universal analysis. We circumvent this difficulty by constructing example sentences where an additional quantificational element in conjunction with sentential negation creates a non-anti-additive context. Additional support for the wide-scope universal analysis of the indeterminate NPIs is provided from their interactions with minimizer NPIs and conjunction phrases. Implications for how the exceptive -sika NPIs are to be analysed are also discussed.

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