A study on multiple interpretations of frequency adverbs in Japanese

This paper is concerned with frequency adverbs in Japanese. Many linguists have pointed out that frequency statements and generic sentences have multiple readings when they co-occur with a kind of adjuncts. More often than not, the interpretation is complicated by the ambiguity of temporal adverbs and the context-dependent nature of the way operator works. In fact, frequency adverbs in Japanese cause at least four readings. We resolve this ambiguity by taking into account two factors. The first one is the syntactic structure at which a temporal adverb is located: it can stand for either an interval during which events are iterated or a temporal point for a single event. Second, we illustrate how the restriction and scope, the two arguments of the frequency operator, are decided depending on the context. Lastly, we show how semantic formulas for multiple interpretations are derived as a result of combining these factors.