Open AccessQ-particles in embedded declaratives, mood, and clausal complementation
Author(s) -
Teruyuki Mizuno
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
proceedings from semantics and linguistic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2163-5951
pISSN - 2163-5943
DOI - 10.3765/salt.v31i0.5086
Subject(s) - presupposition , complementizer , doxastic logic , negation , mood , proposition , sentence , psychology , range (aeronautics) , value (mathematics) , interrogative , linguistics , mathematics , computer science , cognitive psychology , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , social psychology , philosophy , statistics , syntax , engineering , aerospace engineering
Q-particles are functional items that are used to form alternative-related constructions. This paper investigates a hitherto understudied use of the Japanese Q-particle ka in which it occurs immediately below the declarative complementizer and imposes constraints on the doxastic state of the attitude holder. I show that this use of ka is licensed only under a limited range of attitude predicates, and once licensed, it encodes the presupposition that the attitude holder is 'uncertain' regarding the truth value of the proposition denoted by the embedded sentence.