Presupposition Accommodation of Discourse-Initial Too

Sentences with a Japanese focus marker mo “also/too” can be uttered out of the blue without sounding erratic. Instead of contrastive narrow focus, mo-sentences have presentational neutral focus. I will analyze discourse-initial mo as a speakeroriented emphatic marker, similar to indeed or unfortunately. By association with a whole proposition, mo triggers unspecified presuppositions that provide evidence to convince the speaker and hearer that p is true. Even though the presuppositions accommodated by the hearer might differ from those of the speaker, they are similar propositions to p. 1 Discourse Initial Mo “also” Mo “also/even,” a focus marker or quantifier-like element (Kuroda 1969), typically places contrastive focus on a noun phrase. Similar to the English too (Karttunen and Peters 1979), a mo-p assertion is felicitous only when it follows another sentence, such as “someone other than Ken came,” or at least when the presuppositions are satisfied by the extralinguistic context. This paper, however, concerns mo-p that is uttered discourseinitially. (1) Yo-mo hukete-ta. night-also grow late-past “It has become late, indeed.” Such a mo-sentence can be uttered out of the blue without sounding remotely peculiar. Unlike the regular mo, the discourse-initial mo does not contrast its syntactic constituent yo “night” with any antecedent. The focus in (1) is neutral and presentational. Instead of a narrow focus on the noun phrase, there is wide focus on the whole sentence. Mo does not trigger the presupposition that “someone/something other than x is so.” For example, (1) does not presuppose that “the morning grew late and the night grew late, too,” and it is perfectly felicitous out of the blue without antecedents. (2) Haru-mo takenawa-ni nari-mashi-ta. (Numata 2000) spring-also peak-dat become-hon-past “Spring has reached its peak.”