The semantics of exclusives such as English only has been a subject of much debate, with questions raised about the status of the meanings they convey: e.g., Only Max arrived expresses (i) Max arrived (the prejacent proposition) and (ii) nobody other than Max arrived (the exclusive proposition). In Korean, the exclusive/focus particles pakkey and man express meanings that are analogous to that of only, i.e., Max-pakkey an oassta/ Max-man oassta convey both (i) and (ii). These meaning components are known to display an asymmetry in their semantic status. For example, Yeom (2015) argues that a man-sentence asserts the prejacent proposition while it is only presupposed by its pakkey counterpart. The goal of this paper is to empirically examine this alleged asymmetry in the semantics of these particles. In a binary-choice judgment experiment, native speakers of Korean read sentence stimuli with pakkey or man and then chose a contnuation that qualifies either the prejacent or exclusive proposition as the primary assertion of the stimulus sentence. Results showed that exclusive sentences tend to be understood as primarily asserting the prejacent propositions irrespective of the particle, while pakkey can trigger the exclusive proposition to be the primary assertion more frequently than man does. The results and implications of the study are discussed in the context of current theoretical discussions of exclusives.
1. Introduction
2. An Asymmetry Between Prejacent and Exclusive Propositions
3. A Binary-Choice Judgement Task
4. Conclusion
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