earticle

영어

The Japanese focus particle dake(only) has the particular feature. When dake focuses a word, it denies the other existences which come up with the focused word in mind. meaning uselessness of the other existence on the other hand. So far, thess two functional and semantic meanings have been receiving careful study. Also, these two meanings have been regarded to be continuous. But, we have to acknowledge that the two meaning of dake, exclusiveness and uselessness is contradictory to each other in a logical sense. In this paper, I present the meaning of uselessness should be explored as a different sense of meaning. Dake can be assumed to introduce a scalar presupposition very similar to sae.(even). When this kind of scale is presupposed from dake's context, another meaning can be implied easily. From only the context, the meaning of uselessness or the least wanted can be explained. But the meaning is just implied indirectly not directly.