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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on July 17, 2009
Journal of Semantics 2009 26(4):329-366; doi:10.1093/jos/ffp007
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Decisions, Dynamics and the Japanese Particle yo

Christopher Davis

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Correspondence: CHRISTOPHER DAVIS, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 225 South College, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, e-mail: cmdavis{at}linguist.umass.edu


  Abstract

I provide an account of the Japanese sentence-final particle yo within a dynamic semantics framework. I argue that yo is used with one of two intonational morphemes, corresponding to sentence-final rising or falling tunes. These intonational morphemes modify a sentence's illocutionary force head, adding an addressee-directed update semantics to the utterance. The different intonational contours specify whether this update is monotonic or non-monotonic. The use of yo is then argued to contribute a pragmatic presupposition to the utterance saying that the post-update discourse context is one in which the addressee's contextual decision problem is resolved. This proposal is shown to account for a range of constraints on the felicitous use of yo, including its restriction to addressee-new and addressee-relevant information in assertions, as well as its behaviour in imperatives and interrogatives.

Received for publication 24 November 2008. Revision received 2 April 2009. Accepted for publication 24 April 2009.


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