Pragmatic Aspects of Scalar Modifiers

This volume examines the meaning of scalar modifiers - expressions such as<em> more than</em> <em>a bit</em> and <em>much</em> - from the standpoint of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In natural language scalar expressions such as comparatives intensifiers and minimizers are used for measuring an object or event at a semantic level. However cross-linguistically scalar modifiers can often be used to express a range of subjective feelings or discourse pragmatic information at the level of conventional implicature (CI). For example in English <em>more than anything</em> can signal the degree of importance of the given utterance and in Japanese the minimizer <em>chotto</em> 'a bit' can weaken the degree of imposition of the speech act. In this book Osamu Sawada draws on data from Japanese and a range of other languages to explore the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers: he claims that although semantic scalar meanings and CI scalar meanings are logically different the relationship between the two makes it crucial to examine them both together. <p/>The volume provides a new perspective on the semantic-pragmatics interface and will be of interest to researchers and students of Japanese linguistics semantics and pragmatics and theoretical linguistics more generally.