The Ambiguity of Tense in the Japanese Mirative Sentence with Nante/Towa
抄録
This paper investigates the ambiguity of tense in the Japanese mirative sentence with nante/towa. Unlike an English sentence exclamative (e.g., (Wow), John won the race!), a Japanese sentence with nante/towa has a property of ambiguity with regard to tense. When nante or towa is combined with a proposition that contains the so-called non-past form ru, the sentence can be ambiguous between a non-past (future/present) reading and a past reading. This fact is surprising because the non-past form ru can never be used for describing a past event. We argue that the ambiguous interpretation of nante/towa comes from the conventional implicature of nante/towa. Unlike an English sentence exclamation (Rett 2011), the Japanese nante/towa takes a “tenseless” proposition p (i.e., ru does not specify a tense) and conventionally implies that (i) p is settled (i.e., p is/was true or predicted to be true) and (ii) the speaker had not expected that p. We will also consider the case where p + nante/towa is embedded under a surprising predicate and claim that both the embedded and non-embedded nante/towa can be analyzed in a uniform way, suggesting that the embedded nante/towa clause is an instance of a main clause phenomenon (rather than a relative tense phenomenon).
収録刊行物
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- New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
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New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 325-340, 2020-09-11
Springer
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詳細情報 詳細情報について
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- CRID
- 1050575520348984192
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- HANDLE
- 20.500.14094/0100476389
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- 本文言語コード
- en
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- 資料種別
- journal article
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- データソース種別
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- IRDB