The Hidden Side of Exclusive Focus Particles: An Analysis of dake and sika in Japanese

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of two exclusive focus particles in Japanese: dake and sika. Our starting point is the idea, originally due to Kuno (1999a), that the meanings of dake and sika have two components. For dake, the prejacent (i.e. the positive statement without the focus particle) is the ‘primary assertion’ and the exclusive meaning is the ‘secondary assertion’ whereas the primary/secondary status of these meanings is exactly opposite for sika. While Kuno’s proposal is intuitively appealing, the formal statuses of the notions of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ assertions have not been clarified in past literature. The goal of this paper is to offer a principled theoretical explanation for this distinction, and thereby contribute to the literature on the meanings of exclusive focus particles. Specifically, we formulate a formal analysis by building on Tomioka’s (2015) analysis of dake in terms of the maximality operator and by identifying the secondary assertion as a particular type of derived entailment (in the sense of Kubota (2012)) that is triggered by the maximality operator. The proposed analysis represents a new synthesis of the ‘symmetricist’ and ‘asymmetricist’ analyses of exclusive focus particles, with implications for the debate on the typology of ‘non-at-issue’ entailments within current formal semantics literature.