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Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese

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Book cover Contrastiveness in Information Structure, Alternatives and Scalar Implicatures

Part of the book series: Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory ((SNLT,volume 91))

Abstract

The quantificational system in Japanese makes use of so-called indeterminate pronouns, which take on existential, universal, interrogative, negative polarity, or free choice interpretations depending on what operator they associate with. Similar systems are found crosslinguistically, which raises the question as to what makes such system look so different from more familiar determiner quantification systems. This paper takes a first step toward answering this question by presenting an analysis of the German indeterminate pronoun or determiner irgendein from a Japanese point of view.

This paper was written in 2002 and has circulated through Semantics Archive. It appears here unchanged, except for some minor editorial changes. A slightly shorter version of this paper appeared in Yukio Otsu (ed.): The Proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics. Tokyo (Hituzi Syobo), 2002, 1–25. We would like to thank the audiences at the 13th Amsterdam Colloquium, the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, UCLA and UMass Amherst for helpful comments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Thanks to Akira Watanabe for bringing to our attention the fact that Japanese lacks a quantificational particle meaning most that takes indeterminate phrases. Here is how ‘most’ is expressed in Japanese (the ‘floated’ versions are also possible). NO = pre-nominal modification marker.

    Watanabe pointed out that the question of whether the above fact is an accident in Japanese, or it holds across languages that has Japanese-type systematic indeterminate phrase quantification, should have consequences in the validity of the claim that determiner quantification is reduced to a special case.

  2. 2.

    There should be a choice for the world index with respect to which α is to be evaluated in (i) to (iv), an issue we will neglect here and below.

  3. 3.

    There is a question about the correctness of the definition for Predicate Abstraction. It does not quite deliver the expected set of functions. As far as we can see, however, no wrong predictions are actually made, as long as we only use the definition for generating propositional alternatives.

  4. 4.

    Examples (5) and (6) are due to Haspelmath (1997).

  5. 5.

    Example (7) is from the Akademiegrammatik (1981), p. 667 f.

  6. 6.

    There is some discussion in Groenendijk and Stokhof’s and Zimmermann’s work concerning the status of exhaustivity inferences. Staying agnostic with respect to this issue, we are using the neutral term “inference”.

  7. 7.

    In (18), auf keinen Fall was chosen, since irgendein can’t be in the scope of sentential negation.

  8. 8.

    If irgend is stressed, you get the reading ‘I didn’t read just ANYthing.’

  9. 9.

    See Krifka (1994, 1995) for an assessment in the same spirit as the following rather sketchy remarks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

    Angelika Kratzer

  2. McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Junko Shimoyama

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  1. Angelika Kratzer
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  2. Junko Shimoyama
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Correspondence to Angelika Kratzer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Seoul National University, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Chungmin Lee

  2. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Ferenc Kiefer

  3. Department of General Linguistics, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Manfred Krifka

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Kratzer, A., Shimoyama, J. (2017). Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese. In: Lee, C., Kiefer, F., Krifka, M. (eds) Contrastiveness in Information Structure, Alternatives and Scalar Implicatures. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 91. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10106-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10106-4_7

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