Even, only, and Negative Polarity in Japanese

By K. Nakanishi. 2006

51 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Karttunen and Peters (1979) claim that the focus particle even is truth-conditionally vacuous, but have a semantic contribution at the level of presupposition.1 In particular, assuming that even is a sentential operator, it triggers a scalar presupposition (ScalarP, henceforth) in (1) that the relevant proposition is the least likely among a certain set of alternative propositions ([ ]F marks the element with intonational focus that is associated with even).2 The LF of the sentence (2a) is given in (2b), where even combines with C (a silent restrictor variable) and the proposition ‘that John read Book A’. Following Rooth (1985, 1992), a set of alternative propositions in (2a) is obtained by replacing Book A with elements of the same type, and C denotes a subset of such a set that only includes the propositions relevant to the context (e.g., C = {that John read Book A, that John read Book B, that John read Book C}). The ScalarP that even triggers is given in (2c); ‘that John read Book A’ is the least likely among the alternatives.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec474a7d3493e99db60ec6f48926d9351f2c2885