UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9 (1997)
Conceptual and procedural encoding:
cause-consequence conjunctive particles in
Japanese
MICHIKO TAKEUCHI
A number of Japanese grammarians have proposed analyses of the causal connectives, KARA
and
NODE; however, these analyses do not appear to account in a fully adequate manner for the
phenomena involved. This paper aims to clarify, using Sperber and Wilson's Relevance
Theory,
their similarities and differences in meaning. It is argued that they encode both conceptual
and
procedural information. On the conceptual level, KARA/NODE contribute to the
truth-conditional
content of an utterance, while on the procedural level they indicate where presupposition and
focus are to be found. I will argue that their conceptual semantics is identical, and that they
differ
nly on the procedural level.
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