A Focus-Based Approach to Scope Ambiguity in Japanese

This paper puts forward an analysis of scope interactions between Japanese adverbial quantifiers like mainichi 'everyday'and tokidoki 'sometimes'and a negative morpheme nai 'not'on the basis of f(ocus)-structures. In this analysis, three f-structures are assigned to a sentence with an adverbial quantifier and a negative morpheme. One of them represents a negation-wide reading, and the other two represent quantifier-wide readings. Some f-structures, however, are unacceptable due to semantic or pragmatic factors. Different scope behaviors of the two quantifiers mentioned above can then be ascribed to acceptability of f-structures.