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Expressions of prioritizing modality vary within and across languages in the criteria they can encode (rules, goals, or desires) and the directive or expressive speech acts they can perform. Crucial parameters include source of evaluation, endorsement, modal strength, and counterfactuality implicatures. Japanese 'beki' is a prioritizing modal which, unlike the better studied Indo-European modals, lacks epistemic readings and interacts with tense transparently, allowing us to isolate modal and temporal effects of past marking.
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The referential analysis of conditionals has recently been put forth as an alternative of the Kratzer-style restrictor analysis (Schein 2001, Schlenker 2004, among others). Under this analysis, conditional antecedents are definite descriptions of worlds/situations. This paper explores a widely accepted assumption of the referential analysis, namely that conditional antecedents refer to plural objects. I show that the singularity/plurality of conditional antecedents can correlate with whether the conditional expresses modal or adverbial quantification. I use this correlation to motivate an analysis where conditional antecedents are number-neutral by default, but can be forced to denote singular referents. This idea is formally implemented within the dynamic framework by Brasoveanu (2010).more » « less
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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.more » « less
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Butler, Alastair (Ed.)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.more » « less
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