• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2002.02a
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• pp.113-122
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• 2002

Following Herburger (2000), I will develop an event-based semantics for Japanese emphatic particles which can address the issue of the mechanism of association with focus involving the emphatic particles. The proposed semantics makes use of Herburger's three key ideas: events as basic entities, decomposition of predicates into subatomic formulas, and separation of backgrounded and foregrounded information.

• Language and Information
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.21-47
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• 2008

This paper reviews the analysis of the so-called Korean NPIs, amu-(N)-to and amu-(N)-rato, proposed by An (2007). An proposes that the two so-called polarity items are identical semantically, tantamount to English even, but they are in complementary distribution due to the opposite scope properties of the emphatic particles to and rato contained in the NPIs in question. Resorting to Karttunen and Peters' (1979) and Wilkinson's (1996) scope analysis of even, Lahiri's (1998) analysis of Hindi NPIs, and Guerzoni's (2002) analysis of the negative bias of yes/no-questions containing minimizers, An accounts for the distributional properties of the two Korean NPIs. Given this, however, it is observed that unlike amu-(N)-to, amu-(N)-rato could be licensed in much broader contexts. Based on this observation, this paper proposes that the two particles to and rato are two different particles with different meanings.