Emphatic Particles and their Scopal Interactions in Japanese

Japanese emphatic particles such as mo, wa, and sae are known to present exceedingly recalcitrant problems for grammarians. Since they are clearly concerned with connecting discourse presuppositions with the assertive content of the current utterance, their nature has to be pragmatic as well as semantic. Their syntactic, or rather morphological, behaviour also seems highly unmanageable since they interact not only with themselves but also with other types of particles, especially case particles. In this paper, we try to present a basic scheme for treating emphatic particles based on four features: type, self, edge and polarity. We also try to place emphatic particles in their proper place within overall grammar of the Japanese language. 1 Directly Comparable Propositions Japanese "zyosi" particles wa and mo are known to imply the existence of entities comparable to those denoted by the phrases marked by them. (1) a. Taro ga ki-ta Taro Nom come-PAST `Taro came.' b. Taro wa ki-ta Taro WA come-PAST `(At least) Taro came.' c. Taro mo ki-ta Taro MO come-PAST `Taro came, too.' Besides having the same truth conditions of (la), (lb) also invokes in the mind of the hearer the existence of comparable people who might also have come. 1 Similarly, ( 1c) implies the existence of such comparable people. The contributions of the two particles can be captured by employing pseudo-logical formulas as follows. (2) a. Taro wa kita. b. 03X(Comparable(X,Taro) A Came(X) (3) a. Taro mo kita. 'That is, the intended reading for wa here is that of contrast.