Abstract
This paper deals with a seemingly mysterious behavior of Japanese equative marker hodo with respect to polarity sensitivity. It has been shown in Tanaka et al. (2019, 2020) that the marker may be a negative polarity or a polarity insensitive marker. This paper adds to this yet another observation that it sometimes behaves as a positive polarity item. Arguing that this third type of use is just a subclass of the polarity insensitive one, I claim that the equative construction marked by hodo is analyzed as being exhaustified by even-type exhaustification.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not exactly correct because the upper/lower boundedness may alter depending on the denotation of the hodo-clause. In the following, for example, the denoted degrees are upper bounded if we understand that short is analyzed as a negation of tall:
The crucial aspect of the triviality analysis in 2.1 is that in the case of ‘so’-hodo, the direction of the degrees denoted by a hodo-clause and that of a matrix predicate are opposite.
- 2.
A reviewer asked how ‘so’-hodo behaves in this respect. ‘So’-hodo with CT-wa seems to allow either an affirmative and negative context, with a difference in the meaning of CT-wa: With an affirmative context, CT-wa is interpreted to be at least while with a negative context, the ‘so’-hodo sentence has a similar interpretation to the one we get for ‘amazingly’-hodo. I suspect that this difference in the effect of CT is due to the availability of the virtual maximality, which I will develop later.
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- 3.
When negation takes a narrower scope than \(\forall \), it results in no implicature, as in (23).
- 4.
I thank a reviewer for pointing this out for me. I have been benefitted a lot from discussions with Kenta Mizutani on this point.
- 5.
Chierchia (2013) analyzes degree-related (emphatic) minimizer NPIs such as give a damn in terms of EXH\(_{E}\), although the reason he gives is not the one I suggest here.
- 6.
The same holds for odoroku-hodo ‘surprisingly’.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has grown out of joint work with Stephanie Solt and Kenta Mizutani on the semantics and pragmatics of hodo, one of the projects supported by On Development of Logical Language and Mathematical Concepts, Osaka University International Joint Research Program (A), (Principal Investigator: Yoichi Miyamoto). I would like to thank Kenta Mizutani for his comments on earlier versions of this study. My gratitude also goes to an anonymous reviewer for his/her constructive comments, as well as to the audience at LENLS 17. I have been thrilled to have Stephanie as a collaborator and am very happy to work with her. I would like to dedicate this paper to her to wish her a happy 60th birthday.
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Tanaka, E. (2022). Amazing-Hodo. In: Gotzner, N., Sauerland, U. (eds) Measurements, Numerals and Scales. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73323-0_16
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