The Two Kinds of Japanese Negative Nai in Terms of Their NPI Licensing Conditions

Traditionally, Japanese is said to have two kinds of negative word nai, meaning 'not' in English: the nai occurring after a verb or adjective and the nai with an independent status as a word. In contrast to traditional Japanese linguistics, most generative studies of Japanese have made no such distinction but rather focused their attention on such issues as the interaction between a scope of negation and a quantifier and the behavior of negative polarity items. In this paper we attempt to integrate all the proposals of each position by making use of both syntactic and semantic features. We also claim that the independent nai has a distinctly adjectival status with regard to its* semantic structure.