General use coordination in Japanese and Japanese Sign
Language
Davidson (2013) shows
that in American Sign Language (ASL), conjunction and disjunction can be
expressed by the same general use coordinator (cf. mary drink tea coord
coffee ‘Mary drank tea and coffee; Mary drank tea or coffee.’). To
derive these two meanings, she proposes an alternative semantic analysis whereby
the two interpretations arise through universal or existential quantification
over a set of alternatives licensed by (non-)linguistic cues, such as contexts
and prosodic or lexical material. This paper provides supportive evidence for
Davidson’s analysis from two other languages, Japanese and Japanese Sign
Language. These languages are shown to employ general use coordination similar
to that in ASL, but the general use coordinators in the three languages differ
in one important respect: the locality of lexical elements that induce a
disjunctive meaning. It is suggested that this cross-linguistic variation can be
attributed to language-specific properties that concern the Q-particle discussed
in Uegaki (2014, 2018).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.
Davidson (2013)
- 3.General use coordination in Japanese
- 4.General use coordination in Japanese Sign Language
- 5.Cross-linguistic differences in general use coordination
- 6.How to accommodate the cross-linguistic variation
- 6.1Disjunction in Japanese
- 6.2Disjunction in JSL
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References
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Cited by
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