The mirative demonstrative in Japanese

要旨

This paper investigates the mirative property of the Japanese adnominal demonstrative ano ‘that’. Rett (Linguistics and Philosophy 34(5):411–442, 2011) claimed that in English the meaning of mirativity (unexpectedness) in sentence exclamations (e.g., (Wow,) John arrived early!) and exclamatives (e.g., How (very) early John arrived!) is triggered by a speech act operator (Exclamative force (E-Force)) that takes a proposition to produce a speech act of exclamation. Although the E-Force-based approach can capture a wide range of mirative phenomena, we claim that mirativity in Japanese can be triggered by the demonstrative ano. We argue that the mirative ano takes a referring expression Q, which denotes a set of properties holding of a particular individual, and a predicate P and conventionally implies that Q has a remarkable property R that makes Q(P) highly unlikely according to the speaker’s knowledge of the referent of Q. It will be shown that the speaker’s counter-expectational feeling regarding the utterance situation arises from the combination of the conventional implicature and the at-issue meaning of the given sentence. The theoretical implication of this study is that there are multiple ways to express the meaning of mirativity. This paper proposes that there are at least two types of mirative expressions in natural language—a proposition-based type and a property-based type. The former expresses mirativity by signaling that the speaker had not expected that p (Rett in Linguistics and Philosophy 34(5):411–442, 2011), while the latter expresses mirativity by signaling that there is an inconsistency between the at-issue content and the speaker’s knowledge of the property of a particular individual.

主題