Presupposition and Discourse Functions of the Japanese Particle mo (review)

This book considers the pragmatics of the Japanese particle mo, which can be glossed as ‘also’, ‘too’, or ‘even’, depending on the context. Unlike its English equivalents, this particle has received relatively little attention in the formal semantic/pragmatic literature. Shudo’s work, representing her Georgetown Ph.D. dissertation, is an important step toward understanding its meaning and use.

Ch. 1 (3–10) surveys the main results to be presented. Ch. 2 (11–25) discusses accounts of mo within traditional Japanese grammar (kokugogaku), as well as in more recent linguistic work, and provides background on the syntax and scope of mo. S shows that mo ‘partners’ with the constituent immediately to its left, and that, while ordinarily taking scope over the proposition a sentence expresses (in the sense that a proposition is what ‘the meaning of mo affects’ (20)), it may scope over propositions embedded under negation or by a higher verb given the right context.

Ch. 3 (27–66) analyzes the presuppositional content of mo. S begins with a brief discussion of the literature on presupposition, which focuses on the relationship of a presupposition to the linguistic context, defined as the ‘set of propositions the speaker assumes to be shared with the hearer at the point of discourse’ (29). When no proposition in the context satisfies the presupposition, it can be added to the context by the hearer through accommodation. Mo, when applying to a constituent denoting an object with property F, presupposes that some other object in the context has a property G. Both F and G, along with the information present in the context, must entail a third property H which itself has some effect on the context. This analysis seems to be exactly right. Unfortunately, S neglects to mention a correct prediction made by this analysis, which is that when mo appears in the consequent of a conditional, the presupposition need not be satisfied by the main context if some object in the antecedent is asserted to have the property G. Since S’s discussion of the literature on presupposition includes no mention of the projection problem, perhaps this omission is not surprising. Nevertheless, such a discussion would have been welcome, as would mention of more recent (post-1990) theories of presupposition.

Ch. 4 (67–106) discusses the discourse functions of mo: why it is used and what effect it is meant to have on the hearer. S distinguishes three different uses: (i) the ‘entailment-effect instruction’ (75–80), (ii) the ‘antecedent-effect instruction’ (80–91), which is separated into three subcases based on the relation between the mo-marked proposition and its contextual antecedent, and (iii) the ‘non-backwards-contradiction instruction’ (91–101). S states that use of mo indicates that one of these uses is intended because of a process of Gricean inference: if something else was intended, the speaker would not have used mo but instead some other particle.

Chs. 3 and 4 describe how the presupposition of mo is resolved and interpreted when the linguistic context contains a proposition of the right sort to serve as its antecedent. Ch. 5 (107–42) considers what happens when no such proposition is available. There are two cases. In the first, a suitable proposition can be found in the hearer’s knowledge, which S assumes to be separate from the linguistic context. In the second, no antecedent is available at all, and one must be accommodated through a process of inference on the part of the hearer resulting in the speaker’s intended antecedent.

Ch. 6 (143–202) discusses a special case of the accommodation usage in which mo receives a meaning similar to English ‘even’. S shows that this meaning arises because of orderings on the likelihood and informativeness of a set of propositions in the context. S considers subcases of this implicative usage in which mo applies to phrasal and sentential constituents, in the context of conjunctive...