Lucas Rieser (Kyoto University)
A compositional, speech-act level analysis of (Japanese) discourse particles
Abstract:
Discourse particles, which are particularly productive in Japanese, have received increasing attention in formal semantics and pragmatics over the past two decades or so, spawning a growing number of analyses within a number of different frameworks. This talk proposes a unified framework to account for the contributions of the Japanese discourse particles yo, ne, no, daroo, and jan to utterance meaning, analysing them as operators on the speech act level. This analysis captures the interaction of Japanese particles with the propositional contetn, speech act force, and sentence-final intonation, compositionally accounting for both conveyed utterance meaning of particle utterances and speech-act type restrictions of particles. The over all goal is to develop a framework that is capable of capturing the contributions of at least three different kinds of speech-act modifying discourse particles across languages: common-ground management, evidential, and epistemic particles. To demonstrate how such a goal can be reached, I also discuss the Japanese evidential particle soo, the German particles ja, doch, and wohl, and connections to previous analyses of evidentials as speech-act modifiers.