*Daroo ka↑: the interplay of deictic modality, sentence type, prosody and tier of meaning

Abstract

This study examines the interaction of the Japanese modal auxiliary daroo with different sentence types and intonation. A detailed investigation of daroo reveals an interesting paradigm with respect to parameters such as clause type, boundary tone, tier of meaning and pragmatic context. I propose that daroo is a use-conditional speech act operator which asserts the epistemic knowledge of the speaker. The proposal is formally implemented in the framework of inquisitive epistemic logic. That is, daroo marks an assertion of an entertain modality. A rising intonational contour is analyzed as a prosodic morpheme that is paratactically associated to its host and functions as a use-conditional question operator that renders a truth-conditional declarative into a use-condition of question act. A new composition rule that indicates how to interpret paratactically associated use-conditional items is also proposed.