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Abstract Conditional antecedents often contain elements that require the truth of the antecedent proposition to be open. One such element is Japanese moshi , which can occur in conditional antecedents and topics. I argue that in both constructions, moshi requires the context to be “iffy”, in that the antecedent proposition or the set of individuals picked out by the topic must not be settled by the context. I build on Ebert, Christian, Cornelia Ebert & Stefan Hinterwimmer (2014. A unified analysis of conditionals as topics. Linguistics and Philosophy 37(5). 353–408) and analyze moshi as an element that imposes a variation requirement on the speech act performed by conditional antecedents and topics.
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Sensitive to future: the discourse dynamics of Japanese nara-conditionals
This study explores the felicity condition of Japanese nara-conditionals. Building on the observation that nara-conditionals require the antecedent to express information that the speaker has recently acquired (Akatsuka 1985), I argue that nara-conditionals require that the antecedent be in some possible future context set provided by the actual context. I implement the idea in Farkas and Bruce’s (2010) Table model, and explore the consequence of the proposed account regarding the interaction between nara-conditionals and (i) evidentiality and (ii) directive speech acts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2116972
- PAR ID:
- 10330023
- Editor(s):
- Butler, Alastair
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS) 18
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 119-132
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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