Tense intervention effect in negative emphasis: A case study in Japanese

Abstract

This paper investigates two types of predicate emphasis constructions in Japanese: the Affirmative Negative Emphatic Construction and the Emphatic Iterative Construction. It observes that a negative predicate cannot be in past tense in these constructions, and claims that a locality constraint holds between Emphasis and Negation. It suggests that a special property of a past tense form of negation in Japanese can be attributed to a morphological reanalysis.