Japanese alternative questions and a unified in-situ semantics for ka

Abstract

In Japanese, the interpretation of a clause involving a wh-item and the Q-particle ka is conditioned by the syntactic position of ka. In a parallel fashion, we observe that the syntactic position of ka conditions the interpretation of a disjunctive construction of the form ?-ka ?-ka. We propose a two-tier alternative semantics for wh+ka and ka-disjunction that accounts for the parallel syntactic conditioning effect in a unified fashion.