Japanese Pseudo-NPI Dare-mo as an "Unrestricted" Universal Quantifier
نویسنده
چکیده
Japanese dare-mo has been widely acknowledged to be an NPI, furthermore, a “strict” NPI in the sense of Giannakidou (2011) as it seems to be licensed only in an “antiveridical” environment, specifically, with a clausemate negation. However, there is a type of positive sentences in which dare-mo can appear, i.e. non-episodic sentences, which indicates that dare-mo is in fact not an NPI and its NPI-like distribution is an epiphenomenon due to dare-mo’s lexical meaning and the resulting interpretational properties of dare-mo sentences. In the current work, based on novel data we will propose that dare-mo is an “unrestricted” universal quantifier and demonstrate that the proposed meaning of dare-mo and a reasonable assumption about episodic predicates predict that positive episodic dare-mo sentences will be contradictory while negative episodic ones and nonepisodic ones, positive or negative will be contingent, nicely characterizing the grammaticality facts of dare-mo sentences.
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