Dake-wa: Exhaustifying Assertions

摘要

The compositional contribution of the Japanese exhaustive particle dake within a Contrastive-marked sentence is puzzling if only one dimension of meaning is considered. If the exhaustive meaning denoted by dake contributed to an assertive level of meaning, the sentence would cause a presupposition failure, or compute an implicature which does not match the native speakers' intuitions. Instead, I propose that the use of dake-wa indicates the exhaustification over potential literal acts of assertion, rather than the exhaustification over propositions.