Focus particles, secondary meanings, and Lexical Resource Semantics: The case of Japanese shika

Abstract

Japanese has two exclusive particles `shika' and `dake'. Although traditionally, both particles were considered to be exclusive particles like `only', a recent proposal claims that `shika' is an exceptive particle like `everyone except' to account for the necessary co-occurrence of the negative suffix `na' and `shika'. We show that this negative suffix lacks two critical semantic properties of ordinary logical negation: It is not downward entailing, nor does it license negative polarity items. We show that both `shika' and `dake' are exclusive particles, but that `shika' encodes an additional secondary meaning. The negative suffix only contributes to the sentence's secondary meaning when it co-occurs with `shika'. We present an HPSG and LRS analysis that models the co-occurrence of `shika' and the negative suffix `na', and their contribution to the sentence's secondary meaning.