The Japanese Reactive Attitudinal Nani-mo: A New Class of Negative Polarity Items

Abstract

In Japanese, there are two kinds of nani-mo: a quantifier nani-mo and a reactive attitudinal nani-mo. Although both types of nani-mo are negative polarity items (NPIs), the reactive attitudinal nani-mo has distinctive properties that the quantifier nani-mo (and typical NPIs) do not have. The reactive attitudinal nani-mo is non-propositional and usually appears with a negative modal. I argue that the meaning of the reactive attitudinal nani-mo conventionally implies that the speaker considers that the given proposition p, which is salient in the discourse, is extreme and unnecessary, and they object to p in a weak manner (i.e., not totally objecting to p). I then argue that the polarity sensitivity and occurrence with a modal in the case of the reactive attitudinal nani-mo are explained based on its lexical meaning and the general pragmatic constraint of attitude matching. It is generally assumed that NPIs are licensed by negation or downward-entailing operators (e.g., Ladusaw 1980) and non-veridical operators (e.g., Giannakidou 1998) at the level of syntax and logical structure. This paper shows that there is a new kind of NPI, a “reactive attitudinal NPI,” that is not licensed by logical operators but, rather, requires a negative element due to its pragmatic function of objection.