Japanese free choice items as unconditionals

Abstract

This article examines syntactic and semantic properties of free choice items (FCIs) in Japanese. It is argued that Japanese FCIs, which have been considered to have a wh-item and a scalar focus particle demo, actually involve a clausal structure, which contains a null subject, a copula, and a subjunctive modal/mood. This proposal explains a number of puzzling issues regarding their distribution as FCIs compared with those in other languages. A compositional semantic analysis of Japanese FCIs is then proposed based on this morpho-syntactic decomposition; the Japanese free choice items are essentially analyzed as unconditionals, and it is shown that the subjunctive mood plays a crucial role in deriving relevant interpretations (in particular, counterfactuality, an ignorance inference, and an indifference inference) in the spirit of Izvorski (2000). This article also discusses a number of extensions and implications of the proposal: correspondence of different wh-items to different atomic levels in Condoravdi’s (2015) individuation scheme, scalarity of Japanese FCIs, the typology of FC expressions, and connection to correlative constructions. In addition, this article addresses some issues regarding licensing contexts of Japanese FCIs, an existential-like interpretation obtained in the presence of the phrase ii-kara ‘good-because’ in imperatives, anti-episodicity, subtrigging, the so-called Canasta scenario, and partitives.