An utterance situation-based comparison

Abstract

The Japanese comparative adverb motto has two different uses. In the degree use, motto (typically) compares two individuals and denotes that there is a large gap between the target and a given standard with a norm-related presupposition. On the other hand, in the so-called ‘negative use’ it conveys the speaker’s attitude (often negative) toward the utterance situation. I argue that similarly to the degree motto, the negative motto is a comparative morpheme, but unlike the degree motto it compares a current situation and an expected situation at the level of conventional implicature (CI)/expressive. I argue that the speaker’s negative evaluation of the utterance situation in question comes from the large gap between the expected degree and the current degree. The theoretical implications of this paper are that there is a natural extension from semantic comparison to expressive comparison and that there is a type in natural language that can be called an ‘indirect expressive’, as opposed to ‘direct expressives’ like bastard and man (Potts, The logic of conventional implicatures, 2005, 2007a; McCready, Linguist Philos 31:671–724, 2009; 35:243–283, 2012).