Semantics Research Group Meeting, January 25, 2019

The Japanese focus particle ‘dake’ and the Japanese disjunction ‘ka’ exhibit patterns of scopal interaction with negation that are different from the English ‘only’ and ‘or.’ ‘Dake’ and ’ka’ necessarily take scope over negation.

The Japanese focus particle and connective have been controversially discussed in the literature. Shibata (2015) applies the same analysis to both the focus particle ‘dake’ and the disjunction ‘ka,’ by focusing on their scope interaction with negation. However, Goro (2007), following Szabolcsi’s (2004) work on Hungarian, argues that the Japanese disjunction ‘ka’ is a positive polarity item (PPI), although it does not exhibit the rescuing effect. Miyoshi (2018), following Szabolcsi’s (2004) work as Goro (2007) does, argues that the Japanese focus particle ‘dake’ and the disjunction ‘ka’ are PPIs, based on his assessment of Japanese sentences.

In this talk, I suggest a new experimental design to investigate the scopal behavior of ‘dake’ (‘only’) and ‘ka’ (‘or’), which can distinguish Shibata’s (2015) theory from those of Goro (2017) and Miyoshi (2018). Furthermore, I report on experimental results that show that the Japanese disjunction ‘ka’ is a PPI counterpart of strong negative polarity items in Japanese, just like ‘ou’ (‘or’) in French, in the sense of Nicolae (2017).