*Daroo ka↑: The interplay of deictic modality, sentence type, prosody and tier of meaning
Yurie Hara
March 2023 

This study examines the interaction of the Japanese modal auxiliary \emph{daroo} with different sentence types and intonation. A detailed investigation of \emph{daroo} reveals an interesting paradigm with respect to parameters such as clause type, boundary tone, tier of meaning and pragmatic context. I propose that \emph{daroo} is a use-conditional speech act operator which asserts the epistemic knowledge of the speaker. The proposal is formally implemented in the framework of inquisitive epistemic logic. That is, \emph{daroo} marks an assertion of an entertain modality. A rising intonational contour is analyzed as a prosodic morpheme that is paratactically associated to its host and functions as a use-conditional question operator that renders a truth-conditional declarative into a use-condition of question act. A new composition rule that indicates how to interpret paratactically associated use-conditional items is also proposed.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005868 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
keywords:	modal, inquisitive semantics, questions, tier of meaning, use condition, prosody, semantics
previous versions:	v2 [June 2022] v1 [April 2021]
Downloaded:	1102 times

 

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