Modes of comparison and Question under Discussion: Evidence from `contrastive comparison' in Japanese

要旨

Based on new empirical evidence from Japanese, we first point out that the previously recognized distinction between explicit comparison and implicit comparison (Kennedy 2009; Sawada 2009) does not fully exhaust the possible types of comparison constructions. The third type of comparison construction, which we call 'contrastive comparison', calls for a finer-grained classification that cross-classifies the three types of comparison constructions in terms of both semantic and pragmatic properties. We will then show that such a refined perspective straightforwardly becomes available once we extend the previous classification with a closer attention to discourse-structural properties of the relevant constructions in terms of the notion of Question under Discussion (Roberts 1996).

主題