Indeterminates in comparatives as free choice items
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5292Keywords:
comparatives, bare indeterminates, unconditionals, free choice, negative polarity, existential quantifiers, universal quantifiersAbstract
Japanese indeterminate pronouns have different interpretations depending on a particle that they appear with. Indeterminates may appear “bare” in the yori comparative, which leads to questions of whether they are existential quantifiers, negative polarity items (NPIs), universal quantifiers, or free choice items (FCIs), and of how they are licensed. We examine each possibility and argue that they are FCIs. We then provide novel evidence that the yori comparative has some properties of unconditional clauses, which corroborates our previous claim that indeterminate- based FCIs in Japanese are unconditional clauses.
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Published
2022-05-05
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Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.
How to Cite
Nakanishi, Kimiko, and Ken Hiraiwa. 2022. “Indeterminates in Comparatives As Free Choice Items”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 7 (1): 5292. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5292.