Daroo ka”: The interplay of deictic modality, sentence type, prosody and tier of meaning
Yurie Hara
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004457
February 2019
This study examines the interaction of the Japanese modal auxiliary /daroo/ with different sentence types and intonation. A detailed investigation of /daroo/ reveals an interesting paradigm with respect to parameters such as clause type, boundary tone, tier of meaning and pragmatic context. Two naturalness rating studies are conducted to support the predictions regarding the interpretations and felicity of the target sentences. I propose that /daroo/ is a root-level/expressive modal operator which expresses the epistemic knowledge of the speaker. The proposal is formally implemented in the framework of inquisitive epistemic logic. That is, /daroo/ is an entertain modality E. A rising intonation contour is analyzed as a prosodic morpheme that is paratactically associated to its host and functions as an expressive question operator that renders an at-issue declarative into an expressive interrogative. A new composition rule that instructs how to interpret paratactically associated expressives is also proposed.