Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper investigates the Japanese comparison class marker -ni-shite-wa. Mizutani (2022) identifies two key observations: (i) the comparison class marker requires that its argument should have a low degree on a relevant scale, and (ii) the available interpretations of subjects vary depending on whether the predicate is stage-level or individual-level. This paper proposes a formal semantic analysis that accounts for these observations by incorporating a scalar presupposition introduced by the contrastive topic marker -wa (Sawada 2007), and by distinguishing between comparison classes formed from sets of distinct individuals and those formed from sets of temporal stages of single individuals (Toledo and Sassoon 2011). The proposed analysis contributes to ongoing debates on absolute and relative gradable adjectives, indirectly supporting the view that these two types of comparison classes play a crucial role in interpreting these adjectives.