Abstract
This paper discusses the phenomenon of what I call the “projection of non-at issue meaning via modal support” shown in the Japanese counter-expectational intensifier yoppodo and the counter expectational scale-reversal adverb kaette, and considers the variation of projective content from a new perspective. I show that, unlike the typical conventional implicatures (CIs) like appositives and expressives (e.g., Potts [19]), kaette and yoppodo can project out of the complement of a belief predicate only if there is a modal in the main clause. I argue that yoppodo and kaette belong to a new class of projective content that requires consistency between an at-issue meaning and a CI meaning in terms of a judge. This paper provides a new perspective for the typology of projective content.
O. Sawada—I would like to thank Chris Davis, Ikumi Imani, Robert Henderson, Magdalena Kaufmann, Stefan Kaufmann, Koji Kawahara, Susumu Kubo, Ai Kubota, Yusuke Kubota, Takeo Kurafuji, Lars Larm, Eric McCready, Kenta Mizutani, David Oshima, Harumi Sawada, Jun Sawada, Ayaka Sugawara, Eri Tanaka, Jérémy Zehr and the reviewers of LENLS 12 for their valuable comments and discussions. Parts of this paper were presented at the International Modality Workshop at Kansai Gaidai (2015), the Semantics Workshop in Tokai (2015), and LSA (2016), and I thank the audiences for their valuable comments and discussions. This paper is based upon work supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 26770140. All remaining errors are of course my own.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that there are also other uses of yoppodo, e.g. comparative-intensifier use, a conditional use, or an eventive/volitive use, and these do not require an evidential modal:
In this paper, I mainly focus on the evidential/adjective use of yoppodo.
- 2.
Notice, however, that there is also an expressive/CI use of totemo, which intensifies an unlikelihood/impossibility of a given proposition (Sawada [22]).
- 3.
See McCready [14] for a detailed discussion on the difference between a resource-sensitive CI application(shunting application) and Potts’ resource-insensitive one.
- 4.
- 5.
Note that kaette is a kind of degree adverb. Although it does not intensify a degree, it reverses the polarity of a gradable predicate. As illustrated in (i), if an attached predicate is not gradable, the resulting sentence becomes ill-formed:
.
- 6.
However, it may be possible to analyze the meaning of kaette in terms of ‘pragmatic presupposition’ (Stalnaker [25]). In the pragmatic presupposition approach, presuppositions are considered to be “the background beliefs of the speaker”— propositions whose truth he takes for granted, or seems to take for granted, in making his statement (Stalnaker [25], pp. 48). It seems that the meaning triggered by kaette often corresponds to a common knowledge. Whether the meaning of kaette is a CI or a presupposition needs further investigation. I leave this question for future research. In this paper, I will assume that kaette is a CI.
- 7.
Recall that appositives and expressives can have a non-speaker orientation as well.
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Sawada, O. (2017). The Projection of Not-at-issue Meaning via Modal Support: The Meaning and Use of the Japanese Counter-Expectational Adverbs. In: Otake, M., Kurahashi, S., Ota, Y., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10091. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50953-2_10
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