Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

In English, the NPI allows the negative particle to move to the main verb, while being
interpreted as negating “thing” rather than “left”: hence “Maria didn’t leave with
anything” still entails that Maria actually left due to the presence of the NPI. The double
negative interpretation in (33b), however, does not interpret nada “nothing” as a NPI, but
rather as an independent referential term. In other words, according to the interpretation
in (33b), nada refers to an entity that can be described as “nothing, thin air, empty space”
and only after nada’s act of reference is the sentence as a whole negated. This double
negation then leads the addressee or reader to draw the opposite implication: if she did
not leave with nothing at all, then she must have left with something. Note that regardless
of which interpretation of (33) that we choose, the fact that Maria left is presupposed and
is not affected by the negation.
Herburger then goes on to verbs of visual perception in Spanish and contrasts two
versions of the following sentence:
(35) Spanish (Herburger 2000, 25, ex. 22)
El pobre Juan se ha melto loco. Se pasa los días mirando a nada / **viendo nada
Poor Juan has gone insane. He spends his days looking at nothing / **seeing nothing.
As Herburger writes, “[i]t is possible to look and to look at nothing (even if a sane person
might not spend his days doing that). It is not possible, though, to see and to see nothing”
(Herburger 2000, 25). Herburger is arguing that as long as nada is part of a prepositional
phrase rather than an argument of the verb, it can have narrow scope (the negation only
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