Open AccessModes of comparison and Question under Discussion: Evidence from `contrastive comparison' in Japanese
Author(s) -
Yūsuke Kubota,
Ai Matsui
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
proceedings from semantics and linguistic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2163-5951
pISSN - 2163-5943
DOI - 10.3765/salt.v0i20.2562
Subject(s) - perspective (graphical) , linguistics , point (geometry) , computer science , type (biology) , contrastive analysis , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , mathematics , philosophy , ecology , geometry , biology
Based on new empirical evidence from Japanese, we first point out that the previously recognized distinction between explicit comparison and implicit comparison (Kennedy 2009; Sawada 2009) does not fully exhaust the possible types of comparison constructions. The third type of comparison construction, which we call 'contrastive comparison', calls for a finer-grained classification that cross-classifies the three types of comparison constructions in terms of both semantic and pragmatic properties. We will then show that such a refined perspective straightforwardly becomes available once we extend the previous classification with a closer attention to discourse-structural properties of the relevant constructions in terms of the notion of Question under Discussion (Roberts 1996).