On the structure of negation in Japanese and its related problems
Creators: name: Goh, Ethel See Kean
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2010

description: Negation, a rather complex area of grammar, has so far been given little attention in the study of Japanese Linguistics. This thesis attempts to examine the structure of negation in Japanese and its related problems, and to demonstrate what happens to sentences under negation employing the conceptual framework of a recent theory of generative grammar. It is hoped that the findings in this thesis will provide more insights into the problems of negation, and will help clarify some of the semantic and syntactic problems associated with various aspects of negation in Japanese. Recent studies in the area of negation in English have provided various insightful explications and analyses, and the findings from these studies will serve as a basis for this research. The analysis in this thesis is based on the assumption that every well-formed grammatical sentence consists of a deep structure and a surface structure which are related by a system of transformations and that the deep structure is the relevant level for determining the meaning of the sentence. This thesis is organised in the following way. Chapter One is concerned with where the constituent NEG should be introduced in the deep structure, and whether all types of negative expressions can be ascribed to a single underlying form. Related to this, various negative expressions in Japanese will "be examined in order to determine what their underlying structures are. The problems of meaning in negation will also be investigated, especially where they concern the "scope of the negative", that is, what is exactly being negated in the sentence. Chapter Two deals mainly with a rule that has been proposed for English which is called negative transportation. This rule has been assumed to exist in many other natural languages. The chapter examines this negative transportation rule in an attempt to determine whether or not it exists in Japanese. The arguments presented in this chapter will follow similar lines of arguments that have been presented for English. Chapter Three will look into the problems and peculiarities involved with the Japanese negative questions and the yes-no responses that they elicit. The chapter will attempt to give logical explanations for the ambiguity of negative sentences in Japanese and will attempt to explain both the semantic and syntactic characteristics of such questions. The relationship between the negative questions and the responses that they elicit will be explained by incorporating the notion of presupposition. Chapter Four examines the semantic and syntactic structure of the particles mo, wa and ga. The orientation of this chapter will be one of attempting to examine the facts of the Japanese language concerning the particle mo. Basically, the discussion in this chapter will "be descriptive, attempting to characterize the general nature of the particle mo. The chapter will present a general approach for the interpretation of the particle mo, and at the same time, will also present a variety of syntactic constructions to illustrate the approach. The presuppositional properties associated with mo, which are relevant for the correct surface semantic interpretation will also be examined. The chapter will also investigate the relationship between the negative and mo, especially where it concerns the positive-negative relationship between the assertion and the expectation underlying mo. Having provided a general schema for the interpretation of mo, the latter part of the chapter attempts to examine whether the same line of approach is also applicable to other particles such as wa and ga. Chapter Five presents a brief summary of that which has been discussed in the thesis. Finally, I would like to point out that literal translations are necessary in order to preserve the phrase by phrase meaning of the Japanese example sentences. As a result, some translations rendered in this thesis may not always appear to be perfect idiomatic English expressions.