81012925

open access

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日英語における命令文の特性と意味制約

On properties of imperatives in English and Japanese and their semantic constraints

Japanese (日本語)

国際文化学研究 : 神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科紀要

56

25-49

神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科

2021-07

2021-08-30

Recent studies on natural language semantics of imperatives have been concerned with the semantic structure from which imperative clauses derive their various interpretations (e.g., Portner 2004, 2007, Kaufmann 2012,Condoravdi & Lauer 2012, von Fintel & Iatridou 2017, among many others).However, almost none of the studies have yet to find a clear answer to the fundamental question of what part of the natural language system is responsible for the differences and commonalities in imperative sentences found in different languages. In this paper, I clarify the differences in semantic and pragmatic behaviors between Japanese and English imperatives from various perspectives with a comprehensive reference to the results of the studies to date. Specifically, I focus on the following perspectives: (i) the question (rising) intonation, (ii) the indifference reading, (iii) the past-imperative reading, (iv) the endorsement in IaDs, and (v) the rhetorical interpretation. Moreover, I show that the two competing theories of the semantics of imperatives both face the problem of not being able to explain the differences between the two languages in a unified way. The results contribute not just to semantic and pragmatic description of imperatives but also to provide a foothold for answering the theoretical question posed earlier.

日本語

紀要論文