Reversed polarity sluicing in Japanese

Abstract In this paper, we investigate reversed polarity sluicing (RPS) in Japanese, adopting Kroll’s (2019. Polarity reversals under sluicing. Semantics and Pragmatics 12. 1–49, 2020. Comprehending ellipsis . PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz) local context entailment theory of sluicing as our analytical framework. There is yet no prior literature on the so-called strengthened reading in Japanese, much less on RPS. We advance three claims. Firstly, we present three arguments that this construction is indeed better accounted for through a pragmatic-semantic analysis rather than the syntactic neg-raising alternative. Secondly, we argue that the underlying syntax for RPS in Japanese is the pronominal cleft structure wherein the relevant pro-form minimally encodes a local context necessary to license the reversed polarity reading. Finally, we present novel data to show that the reversed polarity reading is blocked under clausal argument ellipsis and argue that this observation, while mysterious under the pronominal cleft analysis of RPS, receives a straightforward account under the argument ellipsis theory of null clausal arguments.