Negative scope, temporality, fixedness, and right- and left-branching

Abstract

‘Negative scope’ concerns what it is that is negated in an utterance with a negative morpheme. With English and Japanese conversational data, we show that for an English speaker, calculating negative scope requires that recipients incrementally keep track of all the material in the clause thatfollowsthe negative morpheme, which comes early in the clause. In contrast, the negative morpheme comes late in the clause in Japanese; thus it would seem that recipients need to hold in memory all the material in the clauseprecedingthe negative until the negative morpheme is produced. Several features of Japanese grammar, however, suggest that this characterization is not accurate. We argue that prosody, grammar, cognition, processing, and fixedness all interact with the grammar of clause organization to afford quite different real-time processing strategies for calculating the assignment of negative scope in languages with different ‘word order’ norms.

Japanese negative suffix nai in conversation: Its formulaicity and intersubjectivity

“…It is a well-established phenomenon that obligatory or core arguments are often left unstated in Japanese conversation (e.g. Clancy, 1980; Hinds, 1982; Maynard, 1989; Ono and Sadler, 2001; Ono and Thompson, 1997, 2017; Sadler, 2007). Ono and Thompson (2017) argue that because of that, Japanese clauses are relatively short.…”

“…According to Ono and Thompson (2017), in (4), a negative-anticipating form zenzen occurs at the beginning of the clause and signals that a semi-fixed form with yasumi nai ‘no day off’ is coming up.…”

“…We have placed the check in the mail; Your telephone call has great importance to us ) (p. xiv). Structural fixedness is also addressed in Ono and Thompson’s (2017) study on English and Japanese negatives: ‘a significant portion of the entries in dictionaries of Japanese fixed expressions actually involve negation’ (pp. 560–561).…”

“…Although traditionally Japanese negation had been treated as simply the reversal of the truth value of a proposition (e.g. Iwakura, 1974; Kato, 1985; Kuno, 1980; Takubo, 1985), based on constructed examples like Watashi-wa Pari-de tokei-o kawa-na-katta I-TOP in-Paris watches did-not-buy, ‘In Paris, I didn’t buy watches’ (Takubo, 1985: 40), where the negative form of an activity verb (‘bought’) occurs with two lexically expressed core arguments (‘I’ and ‘watches’), the discourse-based studies pointed out that many Japanese negatives are, in fact, structurally fixed (Ono and Thompson, 2017) and used to express linguistic subjectivity (i.e. a speaker’s/writer’s voice, emotion, feeling, attitude and point of view in discourse) (McGloin, 1986), as well as intersubjectivity (i.e.…”

“…Ikeya and Kawamori, 1998; Iwakura, 1974; Kato, 1985; Kuno, 1980; Takubo, 1985). While these studies were based on constructed data, some studies are grounded on natural language use (McGloin, 1986; Yamada, 2000, 2003; Ono and Thompson, 2017) and have highlighted examples where ‘negatives are not simply a reversal of the truth value of the corresponding affirmatives’ (McGloin, 1986: 99) but also encode pragmatic notions, such as markedness, speaker-/discourse-/hearer-motivated negation, and textual/contextual expectations, as part of lexical meanings (McGloin, 1986; Yamada, 2000, 2003).…”