Abstract
Japanese has a large number of evidential and modal expressions. Many of the inferential evidentials – mitai, yoo, rashii – also have an adjectival use. On this use, they make a claim about the prototypicality of some object or individual with respect to another class of object, in the case of rashii, or about the similarity of these two objects, for yoo and mitai. This paper provides a compositional semantics for these adjectives, claiming that they are evaluated in terms of the degree to which they instantiate a set of properties (conventionally) associated with a class of object.
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Thanks to Takao Gunji, Irene Heim, Hitoshi Horiuchi, Midori Morita, Tomonori Okubo, and Yukinori Takubo for discussion, to audiences at Kyoto University and Osaka University, and to two anonymous reviewers for Natural Language Semantics for extremely insightful and helpful comments. This research was partly supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant #P05014.
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McCready, E., Ogata, N. Adjectives, stereotypicality, and comparison. Nat Lang Semantics 15, 35–63 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-007-9009-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-007-9009-8