Unifying Concessives and Unconditionals in Japanese
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Abstract
Focus cuts across concessive conditionals and unconditionals among human languages. In English, this can be observed in the overt use of "even" in a concessive "even if", and "ever" in "whoever". The purpose of this study is to provide a new semantic perspective for this correlation by examining concessives and unconditionals in Japanese. In which concessives and unconditionals are both marked by the same morpheme, "-temo". It would be desirable to derive the all the relevant properties they have from a unified semantic definition of "-temo". I will make a proposal to achieve this goal, providing further evidence for the correlation of the two constructions. The resultant analysis will similar to the one for English by Rawlins (2013, (Un)conditionals, Natural Language Semantics), but some differences between English and Japanese will be dicussed.