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Article published In: Sign Language & Linguistics
Vol. 22:1 (2019) ► pp.44–82

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General use coordination in Japanese and Japanese Sign Language

 | Showa Women’s University
Published online: 9 October 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.18003.asa
Abstract
Davidson, Kate. 2013. ‘And’ or ‘or’: General use coordination in ASL. Semantics & Pragmatics 6(4). 1–44.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar shows that in American Sign Language (ASL), conjunction and disjunction can be expressed by the same general use coordinator (cf. mary drink tea coord coffee ‘Mary drank tea and coffee; Mary drank tea or coffee.’). To derive these two meanings, she proposes an alternative semantic analysis whereby the two interpretations arise through universal or existential quantification over a set of alternatives licensed by (non-)linguistic cues, such as contexts and prosodic or lexical material. This paper provides supportive evidence for Davidson’s analysis from two other languages, Japanese and Japanese Sign Language. These languages are shown to employ general use coordination similar to that in ASL, but the general use coordinators in the three languages differ in one important respect: the locality of lexical elements that induce a disjunctive meaning. It is suggested that this cross-linguistic variation can be attributed to language-specific properties that concern the Q-particle discussed in Uegaki (Uegaki, Wataru. 2014. Cross-linguistic variation in the derivation of alternative questions: Japanese and beyond. In Luka Crnič & Uli Sauerland (eds.), The art and craft of semantics: A festschrift for Irene Heim, 251–274. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2018. A unified semantics for the Japanese Q-particle “ka” in indefinites, questions and disjunctions. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1). 1–45. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Davidson (2013)
  • 3.General use coordination in Japanese
  • 4.General use coordination in Japanese Sign Language
  • 5.Cross-linguistic differences in general use coordination
  • 6.How to accommodate the cross-linguistic variation
    • 6.1Disjunction in Japanese
    • 6.2Disjunction in JSL
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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