Commitment to an implicit aspect of meaning: a notional differentiation between concessive connectives

Abstract

This paper argues that the notion of commitment can clarify the distinction between two Japanese concessive connectives -noni and -kedo: the former expresses a high degree and the latter a relatively low degree of speaker commitment to an assumption underlying the concessive meaning. This difference in meaning supports a satisfactory account of some syntactic differences between the two connectives. It is also shown that the difference in the degree of commitment to an assumption is attested in the lexical contrast of the concessive meanings of Russian connectives a and no. These observations, along with some examples of commitment to a presupposition or speech act, show that the notion of commitment is applicable not only to the explicit part of an utterance (statement or propositional content) but also to implicit aspects of meaning.