石川邦芳 言語学研究室
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Japanese Interrogative ka, Implicature, and Pragmatic Principles
LEO 35. 2006
The interrogative marker ka in Japanese widely occurs and shows apparently distinct uses. Arguing against past analyses of ka that were based mostly on performative or speech-act theories, Itani (1993) proposes a Relevance-based approach to the interrogative marker in Japanese in terms of representation of "desirable thoughts. " She claims that all these apparent distinct uses such as rhetorical questions, embedded questions, echoic use, ironic use, and exclamatives should be viewed simply as interrogative, with the intuition of distinct uses being ascribed to the circumstances of utterances. She rejects the past approaches on grounds of the existence of non-(sentence-)final ka constructions which they cannot account for. She argues that, in constructions containing a non-final ka, two forces of performatives conflict between "stating " and "asking. "
However, I claim that Itani's synthetic analysis of ka as an interrogative marker cannot explain dare-ka and nani-ka forms composed of a [+WH] word and ka, the gloss of which will practically be "someone/something (else). " This class of existential nominal expressions cannot be accommodated in Itani's interrogative analysis. It is known that ka has a disjunctive use such as "or, " and I propose that the apparent distinctness between dare/nani ‘who/what’ in dare/nani-ka and an ordinary dare/nani can naturally be accommodated in terms of this disjunctive function of ka. I further extend this observation of disjunctive ka and argue that interrogatives with ka can be interpreted as natural consequences inferred from the disjunctive meaning of the particle, and also that Japanese interrogatives generally do not simply appeal to any obvious structural means but depend more on some generalized Neo-Gricean concepts such as Horn’s (1984, 1993) Q-principle and its consequent implicatures. Finally, I argue that implicature-based analyses, combined with the proposed disjunctive use of ka, consistently capture Japanese interrogatives and their related phenomena without employing notions such as "explicature " and representation of "desirable thoughts. "