Scalar properties of Japanese and English sense-based minimizers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22159243 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Osamu Sawada (0000-0003-1247-0862, Kobe University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 433 |
| Publication date | 2021-03-20 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2473-8689 • E-ISSN: 2473-8689 |
| Publisher | Linguistic Society of America (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4979 |
| OpenAlex | W3137721266 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
The Japanese minimizers kasukani ‘faintly’ and honokani ‘approx. faintly’ and the English minimizer faintly are similar to typical minimizers, such as the Japanese sukoshi ‘a bit’ and English a bit, in that they semantically represent a low degree. However, their meanings and distribution patterns are not the same. I argue that kasukani, honokani, and faintly are sense-based minimizers in that they not only semantically denote a small degree but also convey that thejudge (typically the speaker) measures degree based on his/her own sense ( the senses of sight, smell, taste, etc.) at the level of conventional implicature (CI) (e.g., Grice 1975; Potts 2005; McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2011). It will be shown that this characteristic restricts sense-based minimizers to occur only in a limited environment. This paper also shows that there are variations among the sense-based minimizers with regard to (i) the kind of sense, (ii) the presence/absence of evaluativity, and (iii) the possibility of a combination with an emotive predicate, and will explain them in the non-at-issue domain. In analyzing the meaning of sense-based minimizers, the relationship between a sense-based minimizer and a predicate of personal taste (e.g., Pearson 2013; Ninan 2014; Kennedy & Willer 2019; Willer & Kennedy 2019) will also be discussed
Implicature · Linguistics · Physics · Pragmatics · Pure mathematics · Taste · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Use-Conditional Meaning
The Logic of Conventional Implicatures
The Semantics of Degree
Vagueness and grammar
Context Dependence, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal Taste
Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives
Logic and Conversation
Comparing Semantic Theories of Comparison
A Judge-Free Semantics for Predicates of Personal Taste
Assertion, expression, experience
Varieties of conventional implicature
The expressive dimension
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |