Polar Opposition in Japanese Measure Phrases

The negative-degree members of polar antonymic pairs, such as short, narrow, or low exhibit several constraints attributed to their semantic markedness (e.g. Bierwisch 1989). For example, they do not neutralize in questions or nominalizations and, this is the main focus of this study, they cannot take numerals with units of measurement in the measure phrases (MP). For example: (1) a. This stick is 5 centimeters long/??short. b. The stick has a length of 5 centimeters / *a shortness of 5 centimeters. In the semantics proposed by Kennedy (2001) positive and negative degrees are represented as two complementary intervals on the scale, where the former range from the bottom of the scale to some point, and the latter from some point to the infinity. Degrees occurring in MPs must be closed intervals on the scale, since they are specified by means of numerical values, represented by real numbers. The negative degrees do not satisfy this condition because of their infinity, which renders the second halves of examples (1a) and (1b) odd. In other words, the unit of measurement (here: centimeter) imposes a presupposition that its degree argument must be of a positive degree (in the polarity, not gradation sense) of a given property. This line of argument, based on data from English and other, mainly Germanic, languages is then tacitly assumed in the semantic literature to apply to the negative-degree property words in general. This study demonstrates that the above constraint does not hold for a number of facts of Japanese where no