The Japanese existential possession: A case study of pragmatic disambiguation [An article from: Lingua]

This digital document is a journal article from Lingua, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The Japanese existential construction can be used either to assert the presence of some entity in a certain location or to indicate that something is an integral part of another. It has been noted, however, that the part-whole reading seems to disappear when the nominative NP precedes the locative PP. Contrary to the existing analyses which make appeal to some constraint on movement to derive this disambiguation effect, this paper presents an information structural account. The analysis is empirically supported by the lack of disambiguation in embedded contexts and the significant role of contextual information that encourages the 'missing' part-whole interpretation to re-emerge.