ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers several issues relating to particles in the languages of East Asia, specifically Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. It discusses the evidential particle no in Japanese, which has received considerable attention in the formal and descriptive literature. The book presents new observations regarding discourse restrictions and interpretative effects of Mandarin Chinese sentence-final de in a bare de sentence and proposes an analysis of de as a discourse marker, marking ‘private evidence.’ It discusses the particle ne in Mandarin Chinese in light of partition semantics, according to which the meaning of an interrogative is represented as a partition on the set of possible worlds. The book analyzes four kinds of polar questions, that is, ho2, me1, aa4, and A-not-A questions, in the framework of radical inquisitive semantics.
