From the LINGUIST List: Vol-13-3374. Dec 20 2002. ISSN: 1068-4875.
Home Page: http://linguistlist.org/
Presupposition & discourse functions
of the Japanese particle "mo"
by S. Shudo, Sophia Univ., Japan.
Series: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics. 2002. Publisher:
Routledge. Hardback: ISBN: 0415941679, Pages: 240.
Book description:
"Do presupposition-triggers just trigger presupposition? In analyzing the
semantic-pragmatic constraints on the Japanese particle "mo", roughly
equivalent to the English "too", this book shows how the complex mechanism
of the constraints accounts for its discourse function, that
is, how it enables the [addressee] to process the sentence to achieve more
effectively the [utterer]'s intended discourse interpretation. It provides
a model to explain how the presupposition of a linguistic form and its
discourse function are related to each other. In doing so, it introduces
the notion of 'contextual relevance', the relation between a proposition
and the context, and models this notion in the case of "mo" - incorporating
the requirement that the proposition of a "mo"-sentence and the context
have a common entailment with contextual relevance. The monosemous account
of "mo" also explains how the particle sometimes generates the meaning of
"even" when the context involves scalar expectation. By combining semantic
and pragmatic analyses, the study shows how the constraints on the usage of
a linguistic form reveal the contribution of the form to the presupposition
of the sentence and to its discourse interpretation."
==
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