Negation scope and phrase structure in Japanese

The position of negation in the phrase structure of Japanese remains a contentious question in the literature. Where a particular position is adopted, it is not always done so consistently with other works, and specific choices are not always justified. Judgments regarding the scope of negation would be very valuable to reaching a final principled account of negation's place in the phrase structure, but unfortunately the literature on that matter is not clear either. The data regarding Japanese negation scope is so contradictory and lacking in an empirical base that some researchers have declared it to be useless for syntactic analysis (Fukui & Sakai 2003). Seeking solid scope data upon which to base a conclusion about the structure of negation, we use a Truth Value Judgement Task (Crain & Thornton 1998) experiment to elicit scope judgements from 48 native speakers of Japanese. Participants were shown scenarios designed to elicit judgements on Q > Neg or Neg > Q readings, using two different forms of negation. Based on the results of the experiment, we reach a conclusion placing NegP relatively low in the phrase structure, within the vP domain. Furthermore, similarity between the results of this study and a similar study on Korean (Han et al 2003), implies that overt verb raising exists for half of native Japanese speakers, and leads to further questions in the larger domain of head-final languages, and language acquisition.