Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper investigates conventionalized evaluative meaning (i.e., encoding speaker (un)desirability) in conditional expressions through a case study of Japanese conditional expression tewa. Although evaluative meaning in conditionals has received some attention in descriptive work, it has not been accounted for in the formal literature. This paper fills that gap by providing one of the first formal accounts of the evaluative inference associated with tewa. I present novel evidence that, besides undesirability, tewa also conveys a frustrative meaning related to unexpectedness. Moreover, I show that tewa-conditionals, like expressives, are sensitive to the distinction between descriptive and practical contexts; yet differ from expressives in being truth-evaluable. Given these two generalizations, I propose that both the undesirability and frustrative uses of tewa are subject to what I term a weak practicality requirement, and only differ in what Kratzerian conversational background (i.e., priority or stereotypical) is involved.