Search for: All records

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. 

Stojnić (2021) argues that the content of linguistic utterances is determined by the rules of natural language grammar more stringently than what is generally assumed. She proposes specifically that coherence relations are encoded by the linguistic structures and determine what individuals count as most prominent, thereby serving as the referents of free (“demonstrative”) pronouns. In this paper, I take a close look at the empirical evidence from English and Serbian that she offers in support of this position. Considering these data points in connection with additional linguistic data (also from German and Japanese), I argue that there is no compelling evidence for the assumption that coherence relations directly determine the resolution of pronouns. Instead, grammatical restrictions imposed by different types of pronouns and tenses have a larger impact on the meaning conventionally expressed by complex utterances than what is generally assumed in the literature on coherence relations. 

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). 

The semantic contribution of Fake Past in counterfactual expressions has been actively debated in recent semantic literature. This study deepens our current understanding of this natural language phenomenon by digging into the behavior of Past tense in Japanese counterfactual desire reports. We show that  the Past-as-Past approach to Fake Past makes correct predictions about its semantic behavior. 

Abstract Many languages assign additional conditional interpretations to apparently regular sentential conjunctions (conditional conjunctions, CCs). Following previous ideas (Kaufmann, Magdalena. 2018. Topics in conditional conjunctions. Invited talk at NELS , vol. 49. Cornell University; Starr, Will. 2018. Conjoining imperatives and declaratives. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. 1159–1176), we provide additional support for the hypothesis that CCs involve topicalized first conjuncts. We argue that Japanese and Korean, which appear to lack CCs, in fact mark them quite transparently. Both languages combine sentential conjunctions with topic markers: Japanese -te=wa (standardly considered one of the language’s conditional connectives) and Korean -ko=nun (occurring naturally, not discussed in the literature). We show that Japanese conditional =to fits into the pattern of CCs as well: it is derived by topicalization of conjunctive =to . Conjunctive =to is normally restricted to NPs, but it can coordinate finite clauses so long as the finite verb does not precede =to (Koizumi, Masatoshi. 2000. String vacuous overt verb raising. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 9(3). 227–285). We argue that this requirement can be met in a topicalized clause carrying default tense; the resultant configuration is the conditional connective =to . Semantically, CCs are known to be more restricted than if -conditionals in not readily realizing epistemic conditionals. The elements - te=wa , =to , and -ko=nun are all subject to exactly this restriction, which we refine to exclude only non-predictive epistemics. Following the transparent structure in Japanese and Korean, we interpret CCs by predicating the regular conjunction distributively of the set of (contextually salient and epistemically accessible) situations described by the topicalized first conjunct. We argue that apparent cases of focus on or within the first conjunct of CCs constitute contrastive topics or corrections. 

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.