Reversed Polarity Sluicing in Japanese and Neg Raising
Yosuke Sato
January 2021 

In this paper, I document and analyze reversed polarity sluicing in Japanese. Polarity reversed sluicing, first discovered in English by Kroll (2019, 2020), are a type of sluicing where the presumed antecedent TP differs from the elliptical TP in terms of polarity. I propose that the apparent polarity mismatch problem in this construction is naturally resolved by the syntactic Neg Raising hypothesis (Fillmore 1963; Collins and Postal 2014), a hypothesis which receives independent support from the exceptional ability of neg raising predicates such as omow ‘to think’ to lift the otherwise tauto-clausal licensing requirement on so-called strong negative polarity items (McGloin 1976). I then compare my analysis with an alternative pragmatic analysis of the relevant construction based on the Excluded Middle Presupposition (Bartsch 1973; Gajewski 2005, 2007). I show that the latter analysis not only fails to capture subtle verb-sensitivities of neg raising in Japanese grammar or the crosslinguistic difference between sinziru ‘to believe’ and its English counterpart believe with respect to the availability of the reversed polarity reading, but also has no way of deriving the afore-mentioned syntactic requirement. I conclude the paper with a brief sketch of one important problem with my analysis from non-reversed polarity readings in clausal argument ellipsis

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005678 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	under review
keywords:	polarity reversed sluicing, neg raising, strong negative polarity item, excluded middle presupposition, verb-sensitivity, semantics, syntax
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