An Examination of Negative Sentences in Japanese: Features of Japanese Adverbial Negative Polarity Items

Abstract

The goal of this study is to examine the features of selected adverbial negative polarity items (NPIs) of Japanese, which bear more than just a negative feature [+Neg]. The paper is structured as follows: in section 2 and 3, syntactic features of negative structures are explained. Then in section 4, semantic differences among the selected NPI adverbs are depicted by comparing example sentences. Section 5 is the conclusion with implications for future research.