Open Accesspa/wa of imperative alternatives
Author(s) -
Hiroaki Saito,
Adrian Stegovec
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.61.2018.499
Subject(s) - linguistics , focus (optics) , performative utterance , modality (human–computer interaction) , semantics (computer science) , discourse marker , reading (process) , political science , sociology , computer science , philosophy , artificial intelligence , programming language , physics , optics
This paper deals with topic markers interacting with discourse information in imperatives.It compares two topic markers from Slovenian (‘pa’) and Japanese (‘-wa’) and showsthat while they mostly match in terms of the foci they associate with, their functions differ inimperatives: only ‘pa’ may yield a concessive imperative reading. It is shown that this readingcan be derived while keeping a single entry for ‘pa’ by making attitudes of discourse participantspart of the focus ‘pa’ associates with. The split between Slovenian and Japanese can then beattributed to minor differences in terms of which foci ‘pa’ and ‘-wa’ may associate with.Keywords: imperatives, Slovenian, Japanese, alternative semantics, topic markers, focus,discourse particles, performative modality.