Negation in Japanese

Abstract: Negation has fascinated thinkers and scholars for some 2,500 years.However, within linguistics, it is only in the recent years that negation has been given the attention it deserves. Within language typology, the main subject of investigation has been the notion of standard negation. This is well covered and data from several languages has been presented.When it comes to Japanese, it has proved hard to come across a detailed description of negation. There is a rich general literature covering many aspects of Japanese grammar, but there seems to be a lack of a work that investigates and collects all negation phenomena in one place. Furthermore, the general grammars do not take the typological perspective of negation into consideration. The aim of this thesis is to describe various negation strategies and related phenomena in the Japanese language and to put them in a typological perspective. To carry this out, a questionnaire for describing negation is used. Information and examples are extracted from grammars, articles, and a corpus. This is a descriptive text, and the analyses and conclusions presented can clearly contribute to the already existing literature on negation in Japanese, with the addition of a typological perspective.