Semantics Workshop in Tokai and Kansai

第67回 

東海・関西意味論研究会（Kobe Linguistics Colloquium共催）

  2026年7月11日 (土) 13時30分 (13:30 ~ onwards, 11th July 2026)

神戸大学人文学研究科 A棟1F Student Hall (Kobe University, Graduate School of Humanities, Building A 1F, Student Hall)/Zoom

http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/english/access.html

https://www.kobe-u.ac.jp/en/campuslife/campus_guide/campus/rokkodai2.html (Building 96 on the map)
今回は人文学研究科A棟１Fの学生ホールで行います。学生ホールは、A棟1階のラウンジ近くにあります。(This time, the event will be held in the Student Hall on the first floor of Building A in the Graduate School of Humanities. The Student Hall is located near the lounge on the first floor of Building A.)

研究発表 (Lecture)：13:30~15:00

Muyi Yang (Osaka University)

An additivity-based analysis of permission: The case of Japanese

While prioritizing modality (deontic, teleological, bouletic) is typically expressed in Indo-European languages by auxiliaries like must and may, recent work has started to pay attention to languages that encode such information via bi-clausal constructions (Kaufmann 2017, Chung 2019, a.o.). This paper investigates Japanese permission, which consists of an additive particle in the antecedent and an evaluative predicate in the consequent. I take Korean as a reference point, since permission in Korean is expressed by a construction formally similar to that in Japanese. I first show that an existing analysis of Korean permission by Chung (2019) does not extend to Japanese; in particular, it does not capture the implicature that arises from the construction. Based on careful reconsideration of satisfaction of additive presupposition, I propose an indexicality-based account and discuss a number of positive consequences of the analysis. 

研究発表 (Lecture)：15:15~ onwards

Toshiyuki Ogihara (University of Washington)

Russell’s yacht example, tense, and comparatives

This presentation revisits Russell’s famous sentence I thought your yacht was larger than it is. I argue, following Hans Kamp, that the classic ambiguity is probably not due to the scope of the definite description your yacht. Rather, the crucial issue is the interpretation of the comparison clause than it is. In particular, the present tense in that clause is naturally anchored to utterance time, which blocks the sarcastic contradictory reading Russell associated with the example. I will briefly discuss what this suggests about comparatives, sequence of tense, and the relation between comparison clauses and other subordinate structures, with some remarks on possible Japanese counterparts.