Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese by Lee Peppina Po-lun;

Author:Lee, Peppina Po-lun;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Presupposition of a lower value - + (hearer/addressee oriented)

4.3.2 Reanalysing zaa3 ‘only’ and ze1 ‘only’ under relativist semantic theory

To work out the semantics of ze1 ‘only’ and zaa3 ‘only’, I will argue that, although they share the core semantics of “restriction” (see e.g. Fung 2000, Wakefield 2010, and Li Y. N. 2014), zaa3 and ze1 cannot be the same semantically, and are distinctive in terms of scalar presuppositions and dependence on speaker/addressee stance, which are critical for scalar restrictive SFPs. The zaa3-sentence is understood as a neutral statement of restrictiveness in the sense of “not more than that”, without any further speech act information. As mentioned in Chapter 2, under Rooth’s Alternative Semantics, when the restrictive focus particle “only” applies to a proposition p, this would mean that p is true, and that all true propositions q from a set C of propositions are identical to p, where C is the quantification domain of “only” denoting the set of elements the operator “only” quantifies over (see (8) in Chapter 2). Under Rooth’s rationale, it must be the focus that controls the domain restriction, with “only” quantifying over the alternatives evoked by focus, and the alternative set would be a subset of the set of elements matching the denotation of the particle’s sister constituent in type. Along such a line, the semantics of zaa3 is argued to be (48).

The scalar and non-scalar interpretations are shown in (31) and (33), repeated below.

As mentioned, (31) gives a meaning of “John is only a research assistant but not of any rank higher than that” (see Sybesma and Li 2007), and in line with A. Law (2004), regarding as the “scalar” use of zaa3. As mentioned in Section 4.2, König (1991) holds that whenever the restrictive particle, for example, the English “only”, is associated with an order, the focus value is characterized as ranking low on the relevant scale, given that other alternatives ranking in higher value than the focus value cannot hold true for the predication, with such a scalar meaning represented in (31). Along the line of scalarity of Kennedy and McNally (2005) and Kennedy (2001, 2007), and the restrictive definition of Rooth (1985), Bonomi and Casalegno (1993), and Herburger (2000), among others, the scalar meaning of zaa3 is defined as the notation in (48b), which states that the scalar “only” asserts that no alternative higher on a relevant scale than the focus value is true. While some cases of zaa3 do show “scalar” use, there are cases where zaa3 is used in a “non-scalar” way, as shown in (33). In the non-scalar use, zaa3 ‘only’ contributes the sense of exclusion to the sentences by restricting the set of alternatives to the value of focused expression, with the semantics of non-scalar zaa3 written as (48a), going into a simpler version without taking the word variable into consideration.

Based on the above, previous analyses of Mandarin SFPs distinguished three classes, as shown in Table 4.3, which were later adopted in Paul (2014, 2015) and Erlewine (2017).

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