Open AccessA clausal analysis of free choice demo in Japanese
Author(s) -
Kimiko Nakanishi
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
proceedings of the linguistic society of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2473-8689
DOI - 10.3765/plsa.v6i1.5017
Subject(s) - semantics (computer science) , adjunct , linguistics , computer science , indeterminate , pronoun , philosophy , mathematics , programming language , pure mathematics
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.