An Experimental Investigation into the Syntax of Negation in Japanese

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to provide a unified syntactic analysis of the two types of negation in Japanese: regular negation with -na affixed onto the main verb, and wa-negation with the so-called topic marker -wa on the main verb followed by auxiliary suru ('do') inflected with -na. We establish that-na heads a projection of its own, and argue that this negation projection is located low in the clause structure, within the lexical vP domain. Our proposal is supported by the data concerning scope of negation and argument quantified NPs, extracted through a set of psycholinguistic experiments using the Truth Value Judgment Task.