Year: 2005
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation examines several issues at the semantics-pragmatics interface \nin Japanese and English: modal subordination, particles and adverbials. Chapter \n2 presents the framework that will be used throughout, and applies it to English \nmodal subordination. In Chapter 3, the realization of modal subordination is shown \nto be quite different in Japanese than in European languages; in particular, the construction \nof discourse structure plays a much greater role. This chapter discusses the \nsemantics of the Japanese modals and the realization of evidentiality within them. \nModal subordination in Japanese can be licensed by certain discourse particles. \nIn Chapter 4, I turn to these particles, showing that the dynamic system \ndeveloped in Chapter 1 can be extended to their analysis, although extensions involving \ndeontic modality, underspecification and revision of information states are \nrequired. After making the necessary extensions, a semantics is formulated that \naccounts not only for the particles’ ability to license modal subordination but also \nfor other aspects of their meaning that have been noted in the literature: insistence, \nrestriction to new information, and others. \nChapter 5 continues the discussion of particles, concentrating on English \nman. Man exhibits quite different properties when it appears sentence-initially and \nsentence-finally; sentence-final man is semantically much like the Japanese yo, even \nlicensing modal subordination in certain contexts. Sentence-initial particles and \nexpletives are shown to exhibit semantic restrictions on their distribution and also \nclear truth-conditional effects on the sentences they appear in. Their interpretation \nis shown to depend a great deal on intonational factors in two senses. The semantics \nof degree constructions are also shown to be affected by the particles in certain \ncircumstances. \nChapter 6, the final chapter, steps away from particles to consider several \ncomplex adverbials in Japanese, each of which has an emotive component to its \nmeaning. First, a pair of related adverbials, yoku and yokumo, are considered; \nthey exhibit clear interactions with interpreter knowledge and the common ground. \nThe final part of the dissertation turns to another adverbial, sekkaku, which is very \ncontext-dependent in that certain aspects of its meaning depend on world knowledge.
Author: Eric McCready
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2102076430