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Equative hodo and the Polarity Effects of Existential Semantics

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New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12331))

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Abstract

This paper investigates the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese equative marker hodo, which has the interesting property that it patterns as a negative polarity item on some but not all of its uses. We argue that the distributional patterns characterizing hodo derive from its weak existential semantics, which result in a trivial meaning in certain configurations. We further propose a pragmatic account of the presuppositional effects found with hodo, and discuss potential extensions to other data in Japanese and beyond. Overall, our findings add to other recent work demonstrating that the presence or absence of maximality represents an important dimension of cross-linguistic variation in the semantics of equative constructions.

This work has been supported by “On Development of Logical Language and Mathematical Concepts”, Osaka University International Joint Research Program (A), (Principal Investigator: Yoichi Miyamoto). Additional support was provided by the German Science Foundation (DFG) via grant SO1157-1/2 to the third author. We thank Luka Crnič for very helpful discussion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We thank J.R Hayashishita for pointing this out.

  2. 2.

    We thank a LENLS reviewer for bringing this parallel to our attention.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Osaka University, 1-5, Machianeyamacho, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan

    Eri Tanaka & Kenta Mizutani

  2. Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany

    Stephanie Solt

Authors
  1. Eri Tanaka
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  2. Kenta Mizutani
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  3. Stephanie Solt
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Correspondence to Eri Tanaka .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan

    Maki Sakamoto

  2. Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Naoaki Okazaki

  3. Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

    Koji Mineshima

  4. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Satoh

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Tanaka, E., Mizutani, K., Solt, S. (2020). Equative hodo and the Polarity Effects of Existential Semantics. In: Sakamoto, M., Okazaki, N., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12331. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58790-1_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58790-1_22

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-58789-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-58790-1

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