0100492585

open access

Accepted Manuscript

Interpretations of Sense-Based Minimizers in Japanese and English: Direct and Indirect Sense-Based Measurements

English (英語)

New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

145-160

Springer

2023-07-19

2024-12-18

The Japanese degree adverb kasukani can be combined with a sense-related gradable predicate, such as amai ‘sweet’ or kaoru ‘smell’, but it cannot usually co-occur with an emotive predicate, such as odoroi-teiru ‘surprised’. However, if there is a sense-related expression that is structurally placed at a higher position, kasukani can combine with an emotive predicate. Building on the idea of Sawada (2021), I will first show that kasukani is mixed content (McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2011) in that it not only denotes a low scalar meaning in the at-issue component, but also implies that the judge (typically the speaker) has measured its degree based on their own senses (e.g., vision, smell, taste, or hearing) at the level of conventional implicature (CI)(e.g., Grice 1975; Potts 2005). I will then argue that the projective property of the CI meaning of kasukani allows kasukani to be used to measure the degree of emotion through a sense-based expression, such as mie-ru ‘look’. I will also compare kasukani to English faintly, which can be used to measure the degree of emotion directly or measure the degree of emotion indirectly via a sense-based expression and explain the differences between the two by positing different CI components. This study demonstrates that the multidimensional approach to meaning can successfully explain the concord relationship between a sense-based minimizer and sense-related expression.

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