Improper Movement and Polarity Items in English and Japanese

This paper concerns the licensing of Polarity Items (Pis) in English and Japanese, especially, expressions with any and some and wh-MO (e.g. naNI-MO ‘what-MO') and wh-ka (e.g. nani-ka ‘what-ka'). It is argued that their occurrence is explained in a uniform way by the framework in which the licensing is accomplished through checking of Pis' intrinsic feature and movement for the checking is restricted by the chain uniformity condition proposed by Chomsky and Lasnik (1993). The difference in the distribution of the Pis between English and Japanese is attributed to the difference in the status of the Pis (argument/adjunct) and L-relatedness property (A/A′-position) of the Spec of Neg(2)P.∗.