Projection of Negative Scope in Japanese

Abstract

On the basis of NPIs licensed under the scope of negation, this article shows that in Japanese, a negative head introduced in the head position of NegP extends its scope over TP if it undergoes Neg-head raising. While a grammatical negator (paired with lexical verbs) is subject to Neg-head raising, a lexical negator retaining original categorical properties as an adjective does not undergo Neg-head raising, in which case negative scope extends only over vP. By making use of the raising construction headed by the aspectual verb iru ‘be’, it is shown that subjects undergo raising to Spec-TP when the clause includes a nominative argument, but that oblique subjects may remain in their base-generated predicate-internal position. It is also shown that there are two types of raising constructions formed on the verb naru ‘become’—one type in which the subject of the embedded verb is moved to the matrix clause, and the other in which the embedded subject moves only in the embedded clause.*