Toward an Explanation of Behaviors of Japanese terminers in Negative Construction

Abstract

In this paper, we will explain a system which produces the variation of scope phenomena between determiners and NEG morphemes “NAI” in Japanese. By way of illustrating how the logical characterization of strong and weak determiners (which are provided by Barwise and Cooper, 1981) interacts with the resource domain (a contextually supplied set which is intersected with the common noun argument), new accounts provide for two kinds of readings of negative entences: predicational negation (D-N reading) and propositional negation (N-D reading). The crucial factor concer_??_ the . selection of the predicational negation is the inherent characterizi_??_tion of the strong D (which permits the predicational negation) and the weak D (which does not permit it), which can be adopted to both kinds of negative constructions (simple and complex setnences). However, whether propositional negation in complex sentences is triggered or not depends solely on the context or sentence information structure.