Constructing concessive conditionals in Japanese.

摘要

This thesis investigates the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic nature of concessive conditionals, e.g. even if sentences in English. Since Karttunen & Peters (1979), the word even has been viewed as an element that adds an existential and scalar presupposition. The existing analyses of even if sentences (e.g. Bennett (1982), Guerzoni & Lim (2007)) based on this view are not directly applicable to the Japanese concessive conditional which has no conditional morpheme but consists of a gerundive clause and the additive particle mo. In my compositional analysis, the concessive conditional meaning is build up from the gerundive construction, which is a clausal conjunction 'and' that also reflects the speaker's knowledge about the normal situations, and mo that measures and compares the degree of expectedness derived from the gerundive construction. This study may also shed light on theoretical connections among conditionals, modals, and questions, as well as some issues of semantics and pragmatics of clausal conjunctions.