A Unified Approach to Questions, Quantifiers and Coordination in Japanese

Universal/existential quantifiers can be seen as generalization of logical conjunction/disjunction. The universal (existential) quantification of an open proposition is the conjunction (disjunction) of all its possible instantiations. In other words, conjunction (disjunction) is a special kind of universal (existential) quantification where the domain of the variable is restricted to the set of the conjuncts (disjuncts). The Japanese language seems to reflect this logical relationship. A common way in Japanese to express universal or existential quantification is to use a wh-pronoun in combination with mo or ka, particles otherwise used to denote conjunction or disjunction (Let’s call this quantification wh-mo/ka).1 Actually, there is a strong parallelism between these two uses of the particles: