Decisions, Dynamics and the Japanese Particle yo

要旨

I provide an account of the Japanese sentence-final particle yo within a dynamic semantics framework. I argue that yo is used with one of two intonational morphemes, corresponding to sentence-final rising or falling tunes. These intonational morphemes modify a sentence's illocutionary force head, adding an addressee-directed update semantics to the utterance. The different intonational contours specify whether this update is monotonic or non-monotonic. The use of yo is then argued to contribute a pragmatic presupposition to the utterance saying that the post-update discourse context is one in which the addressee's contextual decision problem is resolved. This proposal is shown to account for a range of constraints on the felicitous use of yo, including its restriction to addressee-new and addressee-relevant information in assertions, as well as its behaviour in imperatives and interrogatives.

主題