TITLE:
A Semantic Analysis of Adverbial Just and Its Pragmatic Ambiguity Based on Scalar Restriction
AUTHORS:
Guohua Zhang
KEYWORDS:
Just, Semantic Structure, Scalar Restriction, Pragmatic Ambiguity, Hedge
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.13 No.10,
October
16,
2025
ABSTRACT: The traditional treatment of the adverb just as polysemous is unsatisfactory, failing to account for the interrelations between the senses identified and their nature. This study offers a unified account of the semantic structure of just with reference to its function of scalar restriction, i.e., its single core sense is to restrict what it modifies to a minimal value on the related scale. Meticulous semantic analyses reveal that, through making pragmatic inference, one uses just in physical-social, epistemic, and speech act domains in sequence until it evolves into a pragmatic marker expressing politeness. In its semantic change, the “preciseness” meaning, from which the restrictive meaning derives, plays a key role because all the newer meanings are pragmatic interpretations of its minimal scalar restriction in contexts. The functional interpretation of just as a hedge is largely context-dependent, though its pragmatic ambiguity demonstrates clear indications of polysemy.