A clausal analysis of free choice demo in Japanese

Authors

  • Kimiko Nakanishi Ochanomizu University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.5017

Keywords:

free choice, indeterminates, unconditionals, free relatives, Japanese, modals, subtrigging, interrogatives, imperatives

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that in Japanese, an indeterminate pronoun followed by demo (indet-demo) corresponds to free choice any in English (FC any). Based on a number of semantic differences between the two, I argue that indet-demo is not a nominal free choice item, but a concealed unconditional adjunct, corroborating the claim made by Nakanishi and Hiraiwa (2019) and Hiraiwa and Nakanishi (2020, to appear). Based on Rawlins’s (2008, 2013) Hamblin analysis of unconditionals in English, I propose a compositional semantics of indet-demo that captures its semantics properties.

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Published

2021-06-03

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2021): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Nakanishi, Kimiko. 2021. “A Clausal Analysis of Free Choice Demo in Japanese”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 6 (1): 1024–1038. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.5017.