Negative Polarity Items and Compound Negatives

Abstract

Lift a finger, a red cent, etc. in English mean yubi ippon ugokasu, bita itimon, etc. in Japanese, while mettani, kessite, etc. do not correspond to any English words. Mettani-nai, kessite-nai, etc. are equivalent to English rarely, never, etc. This paper tries to clarify the behavior of these two types of negatives

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