An Event-Based Semantics for Japanese Emphatic Particles

Following Herburger (2000), I will develop an event-based semantics for Japanese emphatic particles which can address the issue of the mechanism of association with focus involving the emphatic particles. The proposed semantics makes use of Herburger's three key ideas: events as basic entities, decomposition of predicates into subatomic formulas, and separation of backgrounded and foregrounded information. 1 Emphatic particles Japanese emphatic particles I will take up in this paper correspond to English adverbs only, even, and also, among others, of which only could be arguably a determiner when it occurs in prenominal position. Japanese has three kinds of postnominal particles constituting noun phrases: kaku zyosi case particles (ga, o, ni, etc.), huku zyosi supplementary particles (dake 'only', made 'as far as', bakari 'only', etc.), and kakari zyosi lead-in particles (wa 'TOPIC', mo 'also', sae 'even', sika 'except', etc.). In the recent Japanese linguistics literature, supplementary and lead-in particles are grouped together to form a class known as toritate zyosi particles for taking up (entities). This appellation of the new class is taken to mean that such particles mark different modes of conceptualization of the entity taken up for predication (Miyazima and Nitta, 1995: 278). Semantically, they all have to do with focus, as some of their semantic counterparts in English suggest. In this paper, I will refer to the class of toritate zyosi as emphatic particles (EP, henceforth). The main concern of this paper is to suggest a systematic way to capture the meanings of Japanese EPs based on the treatment of focus and quantification by Herburger (2000). I will show a DRT semantics of EPs, which uses thematic roles as predicates and is many-sorted in the sense of having variables for events as well as those for individuals. This semantic treatment is an attempt to reveal the role played by focus in the overall workings of Japanese post-nominal particle affixation systems, and not just that of EP affixation. 2 Internallyvs. externally-induced focus The word focus is used in two different, but unifiable senses in semantics. In one sense, it is what explains question-answer congruence as shown in (1) (1) a. Who did John introduce to Sue? b. John introduced [Bill] F to Sue. c. #John introduced Bill to [SuelF. In the other sense, focus is the locus of the scope of certain adverbs and adverbial expressions (focus-sensitive operators) such as only, even, and also.