On the scope interpretation of a null disjunctive phrase in Japanese

This article investigates what interpretations are available when a disjunctive phrase is phonetically null in a negative sentence. Sakamoto (2015) shows that a null disjunctive element always takes wide scope with respect to negation, but Funakoshi (2013) presents that a null disjunctive element takes narrow scope under negation. In this paper, I observe that only when there is a null disjunctive element and a contrastive focus in a negative sentence, the disjunctive element can takes wide and narrow scope with respect to negation. From the observation, I argue that a contrastive focus is closely related to the interpretations of null disjunctive elements. In order to obtain the interpretations, following Maeda (2017) and Aelbrecht (2010), I propose that a contrastive focus makes the [E]-feature active via Agree relation, and then disjunctive phrases are deleted.