Abstract
This paper deals with an interaction between modes of comparison and interpretations of scalar particle mada ‘still’ in Japanese. Mada is shown to have two interpretations in comparatives, additive and what I call not-enough readings. I argue that mada, as its counterparts in other languages do, induces a presupposition that a prejacet proposition is required to be more informative than an alternative one. Interacting with focus, different alternatives are computed, which, I claim, leads to these two different readings of the particle. Modes of comparison attested in the literature include explicit and contrastive comparisons. I show only the former can be associated with both of the additive and not-enough readings. I then propose to analyze the (un)availability of additive reading in two modes of comparison in terms of the contribution of the scalar particle to Question and Discussion (QUD). The additive reading does not conform to alternative questions, while the not-enough reading does.
I thank the audience at LENLES 15 for their invaluable comments on this paper. Usual disclaimers apply. This work was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 17K02810.
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Notes
- 1.
A reviewer pointed out that the contrastive topic marker is obligatory for not enough reading in EC, at least to his/her ears, and suspected that there was some variation among native speakers. It doesn’t seem to me that the contrastive topic marker is obligatory. I will be back to this point in Sect. 3.
- 2.
The predicates that I tested include: yasui ‘cheap’, atsui, ‘hot’, kasikoi ‘clever’, muzukasii ‘difficult’, and hidoi ‘terrible’.
- 3.
I believe that nothing hinges on this choice of the measure function analysis over the standard degree predicate analysis (of type \(\langle d, \langle {e,t}\rangle \rangle \)). We can implement the same idea in terms of the latter approach to gradable adjectives.
- 4.
I thank Daisuke Bekki for bringing this issue for me at the conference.
- 5.
I thank Hiroshi Mito and an anonymous reviewer of LENLS 15 for bringing up this problem.
- 6.
One might doubt the reliability of the judgment reported regarding dochiraka-to ieba. I consulted eight people (including me) and three of them did not find difference in acceptability with (35a)–(35b). The rest of the people found that the EC in (35a) sounds weird with the judgment enforcer, while mada in not-enough reading improves it.
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Tanaka, E. (2019). Scalar Particles in Comparatives: A QUD Approach. In: Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_26
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