On the Scope of Negation in Japanese*

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the characterization of the negation scope that Kuno gives in terms of linear precedence is in-adequate and that it needs to be replaced by the one defined in terms of the syntactic domain proposed in Reinhart (1976). It will be shown that this analysis is superior to Kuno's both descriptively and explanatorily; it can account for the phenomena that Kuno's rule cannot and it can give a crosslinguistic characterization of the negation scope. 1