Handbook of Japanese Semantics and Pragmatics

Description

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis. Preface Introduction to the Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics • Masayoshi Shibatani and Taro Kageyama Table of Contents Contributors Introduction • Wesley M. Jacobsen and Yukinori Takubo I Word-level semantics 1 The semantics of Japanese verbs • Yo Matsumoto 2 The semantics of nouns • Yuji Nishiyama II Proposition-level semantics 3 Toward an empirical foundation for argument structure in Japanese, a prodrop language • Wesley M. Jacobsen 4 Formal logical approaches to meaning in Japanese • Takao Gunji 4 Formal logical approaches to meaning in Japanese • Takao Gunji 5 Sentence structure and quantifier scope in Japanese: A retrospective and reanalysis • Ayumi Ueyama and J.-R. Hayashishita III The semantics of time 6 Temporal categories: Interactions among tense, aspect, and nontemporal meaning • Wesley M. Jacobsen 7 Formal treatments of tense and aspect • Stefan Kaufmann 8 Tense and aspect in discourse • Mayumi Kudo IV The semantics of reality 9 Conditionals in Japanese • Yukinori Takubo 10 Negation • Ikumi Imani 11 Possibility and necessity in Japanese: Prioritizing, epistemic, and dynamic modality • Magdalena Kaufmann and Sanae Tamura V The semantics of information: Speaker-oriented modality 12 Evidentials: Marking the source of information • Yurie Hara 13 Presupposition and assertion • Tomohide Kinuhata 14 Sentence-final particles in Japanese • Elin McCready and Christopher Davis VI Meaning in context: Inter-speaker modality and pragmatics 15 Nominal deixis in Japanese • Yukinori Takubo 16 Social deixis in Japanese • Barbara Pizziconi 17 Conversational implicature • Satoshi Tomioka 18 Japanese fillers as discourse markers: Meanings of “meaningless” elements • Noriko Iwasaki Subject Index