Korean NPIs Scope over Negation

Abstract

In this paper we argue that Korean negative polarity items (NPIs) are interpreted above the scope of negation, in contrast to NPIs in English which are interpreted within the scope of negation. On the syntactic side, we argue that the grammar of Korean requires a syntactic licensing mechanism, to constrain the distribution of NPIs to only negative clauses. On the semantic side, we show that the semantic relation between an NPI and negation is itself constrained by a generalized version of the Immediate Scope Constraint (proposed by Linebarger (1987), which requires that no other scopal element intervenes between an NPI and negation, regardless of their relative scopes.