This study investigates interpretations of the Japanese initial mora-based minimizer “X.Y...”-no “X”-no ji-mo ‘lit. even the letter “X” of “X.Y...”.’ Although initial mora-based minimizers have a literal interpretation of ji ‘letter’, they have a non-literal interpretation as well. The non-literal interpretation has several distinctive features that are not present in ordinary minimizers. First, it is highly productive in that various expressions can appear in the form “X.Y...”-no “X”-no ji. Second, non-literal minimizers typically co-occur with predicates that relate to knowledge, information, concepts, thought, and habituality, as seen in the corpus data (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese [BCCWJ]).

I argue that in the non-literal use, X refers to the minimum on the scale of the main predicate concerning “X.Y...”. I suggest that the non-literal use was developed as a result of the conventionalization of the pragmatic inference derived from the literal reading, and that the co-occurrence with predicates related to knowledge, information, knowledge, concepts, thought, or habituality is due to the interpretation of “X.Y...”, which were originally interpreted as letters as an abstract concept.

The theoretical implication of this study is that, in addition to a non-compositional (lexically specified) minimizer whose scale is lexically fixed (e.g., give a damn, lift a finger), there also exists a compositional (lexically unspecified) minimizer in natural language, whose scale is specified via the predicate with which the minimizer co-occurs. The last section of this paper briefly discusses similar/related phenomena in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Korean, and English from a cross-linguistic perspective.

本研究调查了日本最初的基于音节的最小化“XY..”- no “X”- no ji-mo'lit的解释。甚至是“XY..”的字母“X”。虽然最初的基于莫拉的最小化器对ji “字母”有字面解释，但它们也有非字面解释。非文字解释有几个在普通最小化器中不存在的显着特征。首先，它的生产力很高，因为各种表达可以以“XY..”- no “X”- no ji的形式出现. 其次，非文字最小化通常与与知识、信息、概念、思想和习惯相关的谓词同时出现，如语料库数据（当代书面日语平衡语料库 [BCCWJ]）所示。

我认为，在非字面使用中，X 指的是关于“XY..”的主谓词范围内的最小值。我认为非字面用法是从字面阅读中得出的语用推理的约定俗成的结果，与知识、信息、知识、概念、思想或习惯相关的谓词的共现是由于对“XY..”的解释，最初被解释为抽象概念的字母。

这项研究的理论意义是，除了尺度在词汇上固定的非组合（词汇指定）最小化器（例如，该死的，举起手指），自然界中还存在一个组合（词汇未指定）最小化器语言，其规模通过最小化器共同出现的谓词指定。本文的最后一节从跨语言的角度简要讨论了波斯尼亚/克罗地亚/塞尔维亚语、韩语和英语中相似/相关的现象。