Is amwu( N)-to a negative quantifier?

Abstract

Watanabe (2004) analyzes the traditionally called negative polarity item in Japanese as a negative quantifier (N-word), to account for the fact that it can be a fragmental answer to an affirmative interrogative sentence, despite the apparent polarity mismatch between the affirmative predicate in the antecedent clause and the negative predicate in the ellipsis site. The polarity disparity resolves in his system due to Agree between the N-word and the elided negative predicate, which induces the [NEG] feature of the former to get copied into the latter and ultimately cancels out the [NEG] feature of the predicate in the ellipsis site as an instance of double negation. This work argues that although Korean behaves like Japanese with respect to the N-word fragments, the negative quantifier analysis cannot be carried over to Korean based on the following two reasons: (i) the neg-feature-copy-followed-by- cancel-out mechanism leads to interpretation failure in some structures involving an N-word (e.g., an N-word as a short answer to a negative interrogative, an N-word in the RNR construction, and an N-word in the non-negation context); and (ii) polarity mismatch can be induced by a non-N-word (e.g. acik ‘still, yet’ as a short answer to an affirmative interrogative sentence and selma ‘(not) a chance’ as a short response to an affirmative declarative sentence). As for the availability of an N-word as a fragmental response to an affirmative sentence, it is speculated in this work, conforming to Ahn and Cho (2011), that such N-word fragments involve no ellipsis and they are to be pragmatically licensed. If this is on the right track, then the semantic isomorphic condition becomes irrelevant to such fragments, and the polarity mismatch problem disappears accordingly.