Negative Sentences in Japanese by Yasuhiko Kato

The book under review is a revised version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation, which was submitted to Sophia University in 1984. This is an excellent piece of work and is a most welcome contribution to the field. The book is well-conceived, well-organized and covers a wide range of topics pertaining to negative sentences in Japanese. The conceptual framework adopted in this work is a version of the extended standard theory of generative grammar which has been developed In works by Chomsky (1977, 1980, 1981) and others. The work also shows influences from such works as Jackendoff (1972) and Ota (1980). The book consists of eleven chapters, of which chapters 310 constitute the main body. After defining the goal and framework in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 provides a review of past works on negation. Chapter 3 is concerned with the morphology and the syntax of the negative predicate na-i. In chapters 4 and 5, Kato develops Negative theory and Focus theory, whose Joint effect, together with individual lexical and discourse requirements, provides the interpretation of negative sentences. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the scope of negation with respect to quantifiers and adverbials. Negative polarity items are discussed In Chapter 8, and Chapters 9 and 10 are devoted to cases of complex sentences and negation. In Chapter 3, the morphological and syntactic properties of the negative predicate na-i are examined. Kato essentially distinguishes three types of na-i as In (1).