The meanings of positive polarity minimizers in Japanese: a unified approach  

Oleh:

Sawada, Osamu

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: Proceedings of the 20th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, held at Vancouver, British Colombia, April 29 - May 1, 2010, page 599–617.
Topik: japanese; minimizer PPIs; expressive and amount minimizers; cross-linguistic/language internal variation; conventional implicature; dimensional shift
Fulltext: 599-617.pdf (249.06KB)

Isi artikel

In Japanese there are multiple lexical items for positive polarity minimizers (hereinafter, minimizer PPIs), each of which can differ in meaning/use. For example, while sukoshi ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can only express a quantitative (amount) meaning, chotto ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can express either a quantitative meaning or an ‘expressive’ meaning (i.e. attenuation in degree of the force of a speech act). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese minimizer PPIs chotto and sukoshi and to consider (i) the parallelism/non-parallelism between truth conditional scalar meanings and non-truth-conditional conditional scalar meanings, and (ii) what mechanism can explain the cross-linguistic and language internal variation between minimizer PPIs. As for the semantics/pragmatics of minimizers, I will argue that although the meanings of the amount and expressive minimizers are logically and dimensionally different (non-parallelism), they can systematically be captured by positing a single lexical item (parallelism). As for the language internal and cross-linguistic variations, it will be shown that there is a point of variation with respect to whether a particular degree morpheme allows a dimensional shift (i.e. an extension from a semantic scale to a pragmatic scale). Based on the above proposals, this paper will also investigate the pragmatic motivation behind the use of minimizers in an evaluative context.

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