Negative Concord Items in coordinate structure

Whether syntactic verb raising exists in Japanese has been a topic of debate in the literature of Japanese syntax. Due to its agglutinative and strict head-finality, such verb raising, if it exists at all, does not show any overt effects on the surface order of elements. In this paper, we examine the distribution of Negative Concord Items (NCI) in Non-Constituent Coordination (NCC) in Japanese. We argue against Koizumi’s (2000) verb-raising approach to NCI, since it makes an incorrect prediction on the distribution of NCIs inside coordinate structure. We conclude that it should be analyzed under the gapping approach proposed by Fukui and Sakai (2003). First, we introduce some seemingly problematic data for the gapping analysis, which turn out to be a counterexample against the verb-raising analysis. Following Kato’s (2006) representational approach to the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC), we argue that the gapping approach correctly captures the distribution of NCIs, while the verb-raising analysis reaches a dead end. The conclusion of this paper supports Fukui and Sakai’s argument that there is no string-vacuous overt verb raising in Japanese.