Why Do Japanese Hai and Iie Not Behave Like English Yes and No All the Way?

Consequences of the Non-Sentential Operation of the Japanese Negative Morpheme Nai

Abstract

Japanese Yes-No particles Hai and Iie are halfway equivalent to English Yes and No, respectively. As long as they are used to answer positive Yes-No questions, Hai is used in Japanese when Yes is, in English, and so are Iie and No. However, in the context of negative Yes-No questions, the correlation between Hai and Yes and Iie and No are lost. This paper demonstrates that the non-equivalence is a reflection of some semantic parametric difference in negative operators between the two languages: Japanese -nai is a predicate-level operator, while English -not is a sentence-level one.