Alexander Wimmer - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Papers by Alexander Wimmer
Journal of Cognitive Science (JCS), 2022
The Japanese particle NONI leads a double existence as a concessive and a counterfactual particle... more The Japanese particle NONI leads a double existence as a concessive and a counterfactual particle. It is in the latter sense that Ogihara (2014) refers to NONI as a 'regret-marker', one that conveys regret in view of a proposition's falsity. In this paper, we unify the two uses, proposing an underspecified core semantics that covers both. While the analysis draws on previous work on concessive (more generally: contrastive) particles, it reveals a new strategy natural language use to convey counterfactuality. Our analysis is shown to also work for cases that do not seem to have been dealt with so far: ones in which NONI conveys regret in view of the truth, rather than the falsity, of a proposition.
Journal of East Asian Linguistics (JEAL), 2022
This paper offers a compositional take on two internally complex conditional connectives in Manda... more This paper offers a compositional take on two internally complex conditional connectives in Mandarin, ZHI-YAO 'only-need' and ZHI-YOU 'only-have'. While the former conveys the antecedent proposition's minimal sufficiency, the latter conveys its necessity for the consequent proposition to come true. Both connectives will be treated as pairing an exclusive particle, ZHI, with a modal, an assumption that is less controversial for the necessity modal YAO than for YOU, which will be treated as a possibility modal. Accepting this treatment, however, we have two connectives that openly differ in modal force. While the surface order will be preserved for ZHI-YOU, an inversion will be shown to lead to better results for ZHI-YAO. In both cases, a possible extension to monoclausal uses is considered.
Journal of Cognitive Science (JCS), 2022
The Japanese particle NONI leads a double existence as a concessive and a counterfactual particle... more The Japanese particle NONI leads a double existence as a concessive and a counterfactual particle. It is in the latter sense that Ogihara (2014) refers to NONI as a 'regret-marker', one that conveys regret in view of a proposition's falsity. In this paper, we unify the two uses, proposing an underspecified core semantics that covers both. While the analysis draws on previous work on concessive (more generally: contrastive) particles, it reveals a new strategy natural language use to convey counterfactuality. Our analysis is shown to also work for cases that do not seem to have been dealt with so far: ones in which NONI conveys regret in view of the truth, rather than the falsity, of a proposition.
Journal of East Asian Linguistics (JEAL), 2022
This paper offers a compositional take on two internally complex conditional connectives in Manda... more This paper offers a compositional take on two internally complex conditional connectives in Mandarin, ZHI-YAO 'only-need' and ZHI-YOU 'only-have'. While the former conveys the antecedent proposition's minimal sufficiency, the latter conveys its necessity for the consequent proposition to come true. Both connectives will be treated as pairing an exclusive particle, ZHI, with a modal, an assumption that is less controversial for the necessity modal YAO than for YOU, which will be treated as a possibility modal. Accepting this treatment, however, we have two connectives that openly differ in modal force. While the surface order will be preserved for ZHI-YOU, an inversion will be shown to lead to better results for ZHI-YAO. In both cases, a possible extension to monoclausal uses is considered.