Abstract
This paper investigates the ambiguity of tense in the Japanese mirative sentence with nante/towa. Unlike an English sentence exclamative (e.g., (Wow), John won the race!), a Japanese sentence with nante/towa has a property of ambiguity with regard to tense. When nante or towa is combined with a proposition that contains the so-called non-past form ru, the sentence can be ambiguous between a non-past (future/present) reading and a past reading. This fact is surprising because the non-past form ru can never be used for describing a past event. We argue that the ambiguous interpretation of nante/towa comes from the conventional implicature of nante/towa. Unlike an English sentence exclamation (Rett 2011), the Japanese nante/towa takes a “tenseless” proposition p (i.e., ru does not specify a tense) and conventionally implies that (i) p is settled (i.e., p is/was true or predicted to be true) and (ii) the speaker had not expected that p. We will also consider the case where p + nante/towa is embedded under a surprising predicate and claim that both the embedded and non-embedded nante/towa can be analyzed in a uniform way, suggesting that the embedded nante/towa clause is an instance of a main clause phenomenon (rather than a relative tense phenomenon).
We are very grateful to Naoya Fujikawa, Hideki Kishimoto, Yusuke Kubota, Elin McCready and the audience and reviewers of LENLS 16 for their valuable comments and suggestions. Parts of this paper were also presented at Functional Categories and Expressive Meaning at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the linguistics meeting at Kobe University and we thank the audiences for their valuable comments and discussions. This study is based on work supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant (18K00531 and 16K16845) and the NINJAL collaborative research project ‘Cross-linguistic Studies of Japanese Prosody and Grammar’. All remaining errors are of course our own.
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Notes
- 1.
There are also what is called a present perfect use of ta, in addition to a regular past use; however, we will not go into detail in this paper regarding the present perfect use.
- 2.
This kind of ambiguity never arises in the English sentence exclamation. As the following example shows, the use of a simple denial is enough to deny A’s assertion:
The utterance of an English sentence exclamation can count as an assertion of the denoted proposition p in addition to having an illocutionary force of exclamation (Rett 2011) and the tense of the assertion is fixed.
- 3.
The fact that nante/towa clause in (28) is syntactically embedded is supported by the fact that unlike the non-embedded nante like (i), the sentence final particle yo cannot be added after nante/towa, as in (ii):
.
- 4.
The existence of ambiguity can be confirmed by the test of denial:
.
- 5.
However, in (29) it seems that there is also a reading where the embedded ru is interpreted relative to the utterance time. We will put this issue aside.
- 6.
We thank Naoya Fujikawa for the valuable comments and discussion.
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Sawada, O., Sawada, J. (2020). The Ambiguity of Tense in the Japanese Mirative Sentence with Nante/Towa. In: Sakamoto, M., Okazaki, N., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12331. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58790-1_21
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