Addressing the widest answerable question: English just as a domain widening strategy

This paper offers a unified account of the English particle just that covers its exclusive, emphatic/intensifying, precisifying, unexplanatory, unelaborative, and counter-expectational uses. Drawing on an insight from another semantic domain, we claim that the chameleon-like behavior of just can be made sense of if we treat it as having a domain-widening function. The key proposal is as follows: the use of just indicates that the speaker is considering the widest set of alternative answers relevant at the context. The analysis relies on the notion of the optimal construal of an underspecified question, which makes use of a comparison between the inquisitivity of questions, modeled as the width of a question. The optimal construal of a question further depends on its answerability—i.e. whether the speaker considers a true answer to be accessible at the context (satisfying Quality) and whether the speaker considers addressing it to be relevant to discourse goals (satisfying Relevance). The diverse contextual effects of just that are observed arise from the interaction between the way in which the set of alternative answers to the underspecified question is construed and what is taken to be the speaker’s motivation for signaling that the widest answerable construal of the question is being addressed via the prejacent.

Recommended citation: Deo, Ashwini and William C. Thomas. 2025. Addressing the widest answerable question: English just as a domain-widening strategy. Journal of Semantics 42(1–2), 1–37.
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