2007年4月27日: 古川幸夫, Nai is not a truth functional negation
[日本語 | English]
- とき：
- 2007年4月27日（金曜日）4:30pm
- ところ：
- 国立情報学研究所（学術総合センター内）12階講義室2（1213）
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- 講演者：
- 古川幸夫 (McGill University)
- タイトル：
- Nai is not a truth functional negation
- 概要：
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This paper investigates the status of negation in Japanese. Negation in
general has not been discussed so much in the literature (cf. Kato 1985;
Horn 1989), and, as far as I can see, it is assumed without any verification
that nai in Japanese is a truth functional connective ¬. However, I cast doubt on this assumption; I argue that a negative sentence in Japanese is not simple negation (described as ¬α) of its nonnegative counterpart α. The paper crucially
uses one diagnostic, i.e. compatibility with an approximation modifier
hotondo. It observes that, when hotondo modifies a predicate, the modified
predicate has a certain type of scalar structure. Nevertheless, it also
observes that negative sentences in Japanese radically accommodate its
modification without regarding the types of scalar structures that their
predicates have. Given that, I argue (i) that a negative sentence in
Japanese involves some additional factor that enables hotondo modification to
be radically accommodated, and (ii) that, due to the absence of radical accommodation of hotondo modification in nonnegative sentences, such
a factor does not belong to hotondo but to nai. I first examine two possible analyses of its meaning. Both analyses basically maintain the assumption that nai is a truth functional negation, but have some modification to handle the unexpected data. I argue, however, that neither of them can fully account for those unexpected data. Then, I propose an alternative account that does not assume this assumption.
意味論研究会
Last modified: 2007-05-02 09:52:30 JST