How Mutual Knowledge Constrains the Choice of Anaphoric Demonstratives in Japanese and English

PACLIC 28 !214 How Mutual Knowledge Constrains the Choice of Anaphoric Demonstratives in Japanese and English David Y. Oshima Department of International Communication Nagoya University Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya Japan 464-8601 davidyo@nagoya-u.jp Eric McCready Department of English Aoyama Gakuin University 4-4-25 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo Japan 150-8366 mccready@cl.aoyama.ac.jp Abstract It has been widely acknowledged that the choice of Japanese demonstratives (the distal a-series, the medial so-series, and the prox- imal ko-series) in their anaphoric use is reg- ulated by the rules concerned with the inter- locutors’ knowledge of the referent. In cross- linguistic discussions of anaphoric demon- stratives, on the other hand, the effect of the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent has not received such recognition. This pa- per has the following goals. First, it criti- cally reviews Susumu Kuno’s seminal analy- sis of Japanese anaphoric demonstratives, and presents a modified version of it. Second, it argues that the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent is relevant to the choice of the English demonstratives this and that too. Third, it pro- vides a formal semantic analysis of anaphoric demonstratives in the two languages. 1 Introduction Since Kuno (1973), it has been widely acknowl- edged in Japanese linguistics that the choice of demonstratives (the distal a-series, the medial so- series, and the proximal ko-series) in their anaphoric use is regulated by the rules concerned with the speaker’s and the hearer’s knowledge of the referent. In cross-linguistic discussions of anaphoric demon- stratives (e.g., Diessel, 1999), on the other hand, the effect of the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent has not received such recognition. The purpose of the current work is three-fold. First, it critically reviews Kuno’s seminal analysis of Japanese anaphoric demonstratives, and presents a modified version of it. Second, it argues that the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent is rel- evant to the choice of the English demonstratives this and that too. Third, it provides a formal seman- tic analysis of anaphoric demonstratives in the two languages couched in the Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) framework. It should be noted, before we proceed, that our discussion will focus on usage of anaphoric demon- stratives in typical, two-agent conversations (dia- logue); the question of whether and how the pre- sented analysis can be extended to other discourse types, such as soliloquy (monologue) and nonfic- tional prose, will be left open. Also, our discussion will not cover the cases of demonstratives that do not refer to a specific entity (e.g., the “donkey anaphora” case, as in: If a man is in Rhodes, that man cannot be in Athens). 2 Distinct Uses of Demonstratives Demonstratives in many, if not all, languages have several distinct uses. We adopt Diessel’s (1999) classification and terminology, where the uses of demonstratives are first divided into the exophoric and endophoric uses, and the latter is further divided into subtypes including the anaphoric use. The exophoric use is widely thought to be the most basic. Exophoric demonstratives (or expres- sions containing them) refer to entities present in the discourse situation.1 1For the sake of …

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