This paper develops a semantic analysis of Japanese expressive small clauses (ESCs)—phrases comparable to English You fool!—within Portner et al.’s (2019) participant-structure framework. We analyze ESCs and the nominal particle -me as conventional-implicature operators that update the hierarchical ranking of individuals. An ESC assigns its referent the lowest rank, whereas -me requires only that at least one individual outrank its referent. This entailment relation explains why -me contributes no distinct status-related content within an ESC but remains meaningful in clausal environments. The analysis also unifies the derogatory third-person and humble first-person uses of -me. We further analyze the honorific suffix -sama as an upward operator that assigns its referent the highest rank. This captures both deferential uses such as Tanaka-sama and self-aggrandizing uses such as ore-sama, while allowing multiple individuals to share the highest rank.
This article discusses emergent empirical data about the Mandarin Chinese collective suffix ‑men, in that it is able to mark a zero anaphor. This is a marked zero pronoun, a covert element (a zero anaphor) marked by an overt element (‑men). The licensing of this anaphoric element has yet to be captured, which is appr...
Darcy Sperlich· International Review of Prag...· 0 citations
It is found that while all models show sensitivity to existential presupposition across syntactic embeddings, determiner types and contextual cues, their behaviour differs markedly in strength and systematicity, with NLI-fine-tuned autoregressive models exhibiting the most coherent and stable projection patterns.
Marie-Léontine Wörgötter, Shiyang Lai, Sebastian Schuster· International Conference on...· 0 citations
This paper seeks to provide an answer to why there is so much disagreement on data instantiating the ACC-marked external possession construction (EPC) in Korean; when ACC-marked EP sentences in Korean are licensed; and why EP-encoding multiple-accusative sentences and non-EP-encoding multiple-accusative sentences have...
In this article, we develop the first syntax-and-semantics analysis of the evidential raising construction of Chinese as in [Akiu (haoxiang) xihuan he pijiu] de yangzi ‘Akiu seems to like drinking beer’ (not the DP reading that this string has, too: ‘the appearance of Akiu liking to drink beer’). PF reordering preposes...
Daniel Hole, Jun Chen· Journal of East Asian lingui...· 0 citations
This paper investigates Coordinated Wh-Questions (CWQs) in Japanese, in which wh-phrases with distinct grammatical roles or syntactic categories are conjoined. Since such elements cannot be base-generated in a single position, CWQs raise the question of what is coordinated. Boskovic (2024) argues that a wh-indeterminat...
