Constructing Concessive Conditionals: In Case of Japanese

Abstract

This paper presents a compositional analysis of concessive conditionals in Japanese, which consists of a gerundive clause and the particle mo. Unlike the English even if sentences, there is no morpheme like if that apparently signals conditionality. On its surface, it looks as if the existence of mo serves as a combination of ‘even’ and ‘if’. I propose that mo can have a quantificational force over possible worlds. By interacting with the meaning of gerundive clause, it derives the conditionality ‘if ’ and the unlikeliness ‘even’ meaning. In addition to a general understanding of concessive conditionals in a cross-linguistic view, this study also leads to further questions about mo which has a wide range of properties from additivity to quantification.