Negation in Japanese by Naomi Hanaoka McGloinReview by: Misato TokunagaThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Nov., 1987), pp. 172-178Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489313 .

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Volume 21, Number 2 Volume 21, Number 2

tirely enthusiastic about DBJG. The above queries are pos- sible reactions, but there is no question in my mind that it is a very informative and useful book that students and teach- ers of Japanese cannot afford to overlook. The authors are to be highly commended for their extremely valuable contribu- tions to teaching and learning Japanese through the medium of English.

NEGATION IN JAPANESE, by Naomi Hanaoka McGloin. USA & Canada: Boreal Scholarly Publishers and Distributors (formerly Linguistic Research, Inc.), 1986. Pp. vii + 135. $25.

Reviewed by Misato Tokunaga

The book under review is a revised and extended ver- sion of McGloin's doctoral dissertation (Univ. of Michigan, 1972). McGloin shows that negation in Japanese cannot be adequately explicated through purely syntactic analysis: a thorough study of the pragmatic/discourse functions of neg- ative sentences is the key to full understanding of the lin- guistic analysis of negation. As she herself states, this work is intended to describe facts rather than to give a theoretical analysis of Japanese negation, based on her belief that "good descriptive work will serve as a basis for any theory" (p. 124). McGloin is successful in raising various issues related to neg- ation in Japanese and showing a consistent analysis of them in pragmatics.

The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 presents Japanese negative formatives (nai, zu, n, nu and zaru) which mark sentence negation. Chapter 2 examines the constraints on the use of [S1 nakute S2] as opposed to [S1 naide S2] and on the ordering of predicates. McGloin discusses syntactic and semantic differences between these negatives and proposes a

tirely enthusiastic about DBJG. The above queries are pos- sible reactions, but there is no question in my mind that it is a very informative and useful book that students and teach- ers of Japanese cannot afford to overlook. The authors are to be highly commended for their extremely valuable contribu- tions to teaching and learning Japanese through the medium of English.

NEGATION IN JAPANESE, by Naomi Hanaoka McGloin. USA & Canada: Boreal Scholarly Publishers and Distributors (formerly Linguistic Research, Inc.), 1986. Pp. vii + 135. $25.

Reviewed by Misato Tokunaga

The book under review is a revised and extended ver- sion of McGloin's doctoral dissertation (Univ. of Michigan, 1972). McGloin shows that negation in Japanese cannot be adequately explicated through purely syntactic analysis: a thorough study of the pragmatic/discourse functions of neg- ative sentences is the key to full understanding of the lin- guistic analysis of negation. As she herself states, this work is intended to describe facts rather than to give a theoretical analysis of Japanese negation, based on her belief that "good descriptive work will serve as a basis for any theory" (p. 124). McGloin is successful in raising various issues related to neg- ation in Japanese and showing a consistent analysis of them in pragmatics.

The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 presents Japanese negative formatives (nai, zu, n, nu and zaru) which mark sentence negation. Chapter 2 examines the constraints on the use of [S1 nakute S2] as opposed to [S1 naide S2] and on the ordering of predicates. McGloin discusses syntactic and semantic differences between these negatives and proposes a

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semantic/pragmatic analysis of them. Chapter 3 investigates the scope of negation, examining several kinds of negative sentences. It shows that the interpretation of a negative sen- tence differs depending on the semantic nature of a verb, the presence of an adverb, the class of the adverb, the presence and the position of the particle wa, the presence of a quanti- fier (with/without wa), the presence of a suffixing mor- pheme of passive, potential, causative or desiderative, and pragmatic presuppositions. Chapter 4 examines negative contexts indicated by various kinds of negative polarity items. The author claims that the speaker's negative expec- tation constitutes implied negation. In Chapter 5, McGloin's main claim for negation in Japanese as a pragmatic/dis- course function is demonstrated and argued with more evidence, such as "ga-ni conversion" and "n ja nai" con- struction. She finally concludes that there are three types of negative use in Japanese: (a) speaker-motivated (non-wa- marked) negation, (b) discourse-motivated (wa-marked) neg- ation and (c) hearer-motivated (no-marked) negation. Chap- ter 6 is the summary of McGloin's analyses of negation.

McGloin's principal purpose in this study is to clarify the notion of negation, based on her claim that the discourse/ pragmatic function of negative sentences is inherently dif- ferent from that of affirmative sentences in the sense that the scope of negation is outside the norm while that of affir- mative statements is within the norm. She uses "the speak- er's expectation" to define "the norm." In this case, the target of negation is "new information," one outside the norm. Throughout the study, McGloin argues for the fact that inter- pretation of the Japanese negative sentences is highly de- pendent on the context and, further, that the presupposition of a word within the individual speaker's expectation is crucial to the appropriate interpretation, since "negative sentences are uttered in a context where corresponding affirmatives have somehow been registered in the discourse" (p. 107).

McGloin successfully demonstrates, extensively in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, the complexity of negative sentences in terms of their interpretations, namely, the scope of negation. The only difficulty I had in understanding McGloin's argu- ment is her explanation of possible interpretations of some

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cases according to the rules and conditions that she proposes. She does not explicitly delineate whether a certain condition is a principal rule, a sub-rule or a constraint for a special case.

For example, she explains in Chapter 3 that (A) con- trastive wa attaches to various constituents (X) of a sentence and indicates that X is the target of negation (p. 42). Then she proposes a rule of the interpretation of the possible target of negation: (B) if wa is directly dominated by a node X, the tar- get of NEG(ation) includes all nodes dominated by X (79, p. 48), showing the formula as follows:

So

Theme S1

NP NEG I

S2

NP wa I

S3

According to (A) above, X can be NP, PP or VP. Thus, (A) in- cludes both NP-reading and VP-reading. On the other hand, (B) says that the target of negation is S3: it indicates VP- reading. It is confusing whether she stated (A) and (B) to indicate different scopes of negation or essentially to indicate the same. She also explains for (B) that "wa in [V-wa-neg] takes the entire sentence in its scope" (p. 47); it is again not clear whether she means that the scope of negation is So or S2 by saying "the entire sentence in its scope".

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Moreover, some examples, such as (lb) below, cannot be accounted for by either (A) or (B), since (lb) obtains two kinds of readings, NP-scope and VP-scope readings. Sentence (Ib), as a response to (la), can obtain VP-scope reading as well as NP-scope reading, although the target of negation is to be NP-wa (gakkoo e) according to (A) and to be the entire embedded sentence (gakkoo e ik-) according to (B). The con- fusion occurs because she offers no explicit discussion of the correlation between (A) and (B) and her explanations of some particular cases like (lb); that is, she does not specify which rule is the principal one that essentially accounts for the scope of negation and whether her semantic conditions (ex- plained in the next paragraph) are the semantic constraints for the case of (lb) and (4)-(6) below.

(1) a. Hanako wa kinoo Merii to gakkoo e it-ta? (63,in Ch.3) yesterday Mary with school to go-Past

'Did Hanako go to school with Mary yesterday?'

b. Uun, gakkoo e wa ik-ana-kat-ta. 'No, she didn't go to school.' (=63d)

NP-scope reading: Hanako did not go to school, but went somewhere else.

VP-scope reading: She did not go to school, but did something else.

(2) Gakkoo e iki wa shi-na-kat-ta. 'She did not go to school.' (64) school to go do-Neg-Past

(3) Taroo wa hon wa kaw-ana-kat-ta. (65) book buy-Neg-Past

Taroo did not buy a book.'

??VP-scope reading: Taroo did not buy a book, but did something else. NP-scope reading: Taroo did not buy a book, but something else.

According to McGloin (lb) is synonymous with (2), although (2) obtains only VP-scope reading. Moreover, the VP-scope reading is difficult to obtain for (3), although (3) is similar to (lb), in which wa is marking NP but not V stem as in (2); VP-scope read-

ing is marginal for (3).

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She explains that "whether NP wa V is interpreted as NP- scope reading or VP-scope reading . .. depends on whether the sentence is associated with a set of NPs or a set of VPs" (p. 43). Thus, "we associate this sentence (3 = 65) with a set of objects that Taroo could have bought but not with a set of activities he could have done" (p. 44). According to her, whether sentences like (Ib) and (3) obtain only one reading or both depends on two factors: (i) the availability of other actions which can be easily associated with the sentence in a particular context, and (ii) the semantic association of NP and a verb. That is, object NPs are more closely linked to transitive verbs than locative or commita- tive NPs and the directional NP to verbs of motion than any other NPs. Therefore, "object NPs and directional NPs are an obligatory part of a case frame for transitive and directional verbs, respectively, while locative and commitative NPs are an optional part of the case frame" (p. 44). She does not discuss why (lb) easily obtains both NP-scope and VP-scope readings but (3) does not. The following are more examples, which obtain both NP-scope and VP-scope readings and which can be explained by the semantic and pragmatic factors, (i) and (ii).

(4) Taroo wa Hanako to eiga wa mi-na-kat-ta. (68a) with movie see-Neg-Past

Taroo did not see a movie with Hanako.' NP-scope reading: Taroo saw something other than a movie

with Hanako. VP-scope reading: Taroo did something with Hanako other than

seeing a movie.

(5) Taroo wa toshokan de hon wa yom-ana-kat-ta. (69a) library in book read-Neg-Past

Taroo did not read a book in the library.'

(6) Kaze wa huk-ana-kat-ta. (71 a) wind blow-Neg-Past The wind did not blow.'

McGloin's semantic and pragmatic explanations of the sentences above seem to be adequate. It would have been much clearer, however, if she had explicitly stated whether (A) or (B) is the principal rule, and whether the semantic/pragmatic explana- tions are the constraints when an NP is an obligatory part of a case frame for either a transitive verb or a directional verb.

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McGloin discusses a wide range of problems which in- volve negation in terms of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and gives invaluable analyses of them. One regrettable aspect in McGloin's arguments is that she does not discuss the important recent works on negation in relation to her analysis (Kuno 1980, 1982, 1983; Reinhart, 1983). It would have been more beneficial to us if she had argued for/against these works and incorporated their analyses into hers.

Kuno's principal rule is that the scope of nai does not extend beyond the VPs immediately preceding them. For the cases where constituents outside the VPs can be the focus of negation, a rule called "a multiple choice (MC) focus" allows the constituents to be the possible focus of negation. This rule is a pragmatic one that identifies the focus of negation when the speaker could presuppose a closed set of alternatives to choose from. There are overlaps notionally between McGloin's analysis and Kuno's analysis in terms of the basic pragmatic notion of "the speaker's expectation/presupposition" as the target of negation.

Reinhart's syntactic analysis of the scope of the English negation may be applied to the analysis of the scope of the Japanese negative morpheme nai (see Takubo 1985): the nodes that can be in negation focus should be in the syntactic domain. Subjects, sentential adverbs and preposed phrases (i.e., any ad- juncts which occur before the predication) are not in the syn- tactic domain of not. Thus, Reinhart's analysis gives a simpler generalization of the scope of negation. Takubo (1985) discusses and argues against Kuno's analysis on the scope of negation and proposes a fine analysis of the Japanese negation based on Reinhart's analysis. McGloin's arguments might have been more convincing if she had included the analyses of Kuno and Reinhart in her discussions.

It is natural that one always finds problems in any human work. There is no doubt, however, that McGloin's work will make significant contributions to the linguistic analysis of ne- gation in any language. "The negatives are not simple reversals of the truth value of their corresponding affirmatives" (p. 123), but they are the reflections of the speaker's conceptual attitudes toward the situations. The scope of negation is often determined by the semantic/pragmatic factors rather than by the syntactic

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positions of the negative and/or of the particle wa. This book contains many insights for the analysis of negation.

REFERENCES

Horn, L. 1985. "Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity". Language, 61:121-74.

Kuno, S. 1980. "The Scope of the Question and the Negation in Some Verb-Final Languages", Chicago Linguistic Society, ol. 16, 155-57 (University of Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society).

1982. "The Focus of the Question and the Focus of the Answer". Papers from the Parasession on Nondeclara- tives, 134-57. Chicago Linguistic Society.

1983. Shin Nihon bunpoo kenkyuu (New Studies of Japanese Grammar.) Tokyo: Taishuukan.

Reinhart, T. 1976. Syntactic Domain of Anaphora. Diss., MIT.

1983. Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation. London and Canberra: Croom Helm.

Shopen, T. (ed). 1985. Language Typology and Syntactic Des- cription: Clause Structure. Cambridge University Press.

Takubo, Y. 1983. "On the Scope of the Question and the Nega- tion". Papers from the Kyoto Workshop on Japanese Syntax and Semantics, 48-69. The Kyoto Circle for Japa- nese Linguistics.

1985. "On the Scope of Negation and Question in Japa- nese". Papers in Japanese Linguistics, 10:87-115.

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