{"title":"Sense-based low-degree modifiers in Japanese and English: their relations to experience, evaluation, and emotions","authors":"Osamu Sawada","doi":"10.1007/s10988-023-09404-2","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study investigates the meanings of the Japanese low-degree modifiers <i>kasukani</i> ‘faintly’ and <i>honokani</i> ‘approx. faintly’ and the English low-degree modifier <i>faintly</i>. I argue that, unlike typical low-degree modifiers such as <i>sukoshi</i> ‘a bit’ in Japanese and <i>a bit</i> in English, they are sense-based in that they not only semantically denote a small degree but also convey that the judge (typically the speaker) measures the degree of predicates based on their own sense (the senses of sight, smell, taste, etc.) at the level of conventional implicature (CI) (e.g., Grice (in: Cole, Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics iii: speech acts, Academic Press, New York, 1975), Potts (The logic of conventional implicatures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005), McCready (Semant Pragmat 3:1–57, 2010. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.3.8, Sawada (Pragmatic aspects of scalar modifiers. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2010), Gutzmann (Empir Issues Syntax Semant 8:123–141, 2011)). I will also show that there are variations among the sense-based low-degree modifiers with regard to (i) the kind of sense, (ii) the presence/absence of positive evaluativity, and (iii) the possibility of direct measurement of emotion and will explain the variations in relation to the CI component. A unique feature of sense-based low-degree modifiers is that they can indirectly measure the degree of non-sense-based predicates (e.g., emotion) through sense (e.g., perception). I show that the proposed analysis can also explain the indirect measurement in a unified way. This paper shows that like predicates of personal taste such as <i>tasty</i> (e.g., Pearson (J Semant 30(1):103–154, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffs001), Ninan (Proc Semant Linguist Theory, 24:290–304, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v24i0.2413), Willer & Kennedy (Inquiry, 1–37, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1850338)), sense-based low-degree modifiers trigger acquaintance inference. The difference between them is that, unlike predicates of personal taste, sense-based low-degree modifiers co-occur with gradable predicates and their experiential components signal the manner/way in which the degree of the predicate in question is measured.</p>","PeriodicalId":47748,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics and Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Linguistics and Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09404-2","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This study investigates the meanings of the Japanese low-degree modifiers kasukani ‘faintly’ and honokani ‘approx. faintly’ and the English low-degree modifier faintly. I argue that, unlike typical low-degree modifiers such as sukoshi ‘a bit’ in Japanese and a bit in English, they are sense-based in that they not only semantically denote a small degree but also convey that the judge (typically the speaker) measures the degree of predicates based on their own sense (the senses of sight, smell, taste, etc.) at the level of conventional implicature (CI) (e.g., Grice (in: Cole, Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics iii: speech acts, Academic Press, New York, 1975), Potts (The logic of conventional implicatures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005), McCready (Semant Pragmat 3:1–57, 2010. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.3.8, Sawada (Pragmatic aspects of scalar modifiers. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2010), Gutzmann (Empir Issues Syntax Semant 8:123–141, 2011)). I will also show that there are variations among the sense-based low-degree modifiers with regard to (i) the kind of sense, (ii) the presence/absence of positive evaluativity, and (iii) the possibility of direct measurement of emotion and will explain the variations in relation to the CI component. A unique feature of sense-based low-degree modifiers is that they can indirectly measure the degree of non-sense-based predicates (e.g., emotion) through sense (e.g., perception). I show that the proposed analysis can also explain the indirect measurement in a unified way. This paper shows that like predicates of personal taste such as tasty (e.g., Pearson (J Semant 30(1):103–154, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffs001), Ninan (Proc Semant Linguist Theory, 24:290–304, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v24i0.2413), Willer & Kennedy (Inquiry, 1–37, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1850338)), sense-based low-degree modifiers trigger acquaintance inference. The difference between them is that, unlike predicates of personal taste, sense-based low-degree modifiers co-occur with gradable predicates and their experiential components signal the manner/way in which the degree of the predicate in question is measured.
期刊介绍:
Linguistics and Philosophy focuses on issues related to structure and meaning in natural language, as addressed in the semantics, philosophy of language, pragmatics and related disciplines, in particular the following areas: philosophical theories of meaning and truth, reference, description, entailment, presupposition, implicatures, context-dependence, and speech actslinguistic theories of semantic interpretation in relation to syntactic structure and prosody, of discourse structure, lexcial semantics and semantic changepsycholinguistic theories of semantic interpretation and issues of the processing and acquisition of natural language, and the relation of semantic interpretation to other cognitive facultiesmathematical and logical properties of natural language and general aspects of computational linguisticsphilosophical questions raised by linguistics as a science: linguistics methodology, properties of linguistic theories and frameworks, and the relation of linguistics to other fields of inquiryContributions may be in the form of articles, replies, or review articles. Linguistics and Philosophy is indexed in the ISI/Social Science Citation Index.