Organizer: Polly Szatrowski, University of Minnesota
Chair and Discussant: Charles J. Quinn, Jr., Ohio State University
The papers in this panel are concerned with the evolution and function of Japanese expressions on the interpersonal edge. Focuses of analysis include negative and aspectual morphemes, epistemic modals and final particles. By interpersonal edge we mean forms typically occurring in clause final position that express the speaker's subjective attitude or indicate how an utterance acts on the hearer, i.e., forms which function similarly to those in Minami's (1974) C and D strata of sentence structure.
Soo da na. / Abe san wa / asita / koko e ko / nai / daroo / ne.
...A....
.......B........
.................C............
........................D..................
"Hmm. Abe probably won't come here tomorrow, huh." We extend previous studies of dictum/mood (Tokieda 1941, Watanabe 1953) and modality (Teramura 1982, Nitta 1985, Masuoka 1990) in our consideration of the evolution and function of these forms in discourse.
Suzuki and Inoue focus on the development and function of expressions that have moved out to the interpersonal edge from the B strata (judgments related to truth value, tense/aspect). Suzuki analyzes the change in categorical status of te simau/ tyau, an aspectual morpheme indicating completion, and wake, a lexical noun meaning 'reason,' to pragmatic morphemes that indicate speaker's stance.
Inoue's analysis divides negative questions (nai ka) into two types. While analytic nai ka functions as a yes no question, i.e., to express an objective judgment about the proposition, synthetic NAIKA acts on the hearer to revive an excluded assumption, thus moving out to the interpersonal edge.
Szatrowski contrasts the functions of the epistemic modal desyoo with English tag questions. Building on Hasunuma's (1993) analysis of daroo for "evocation of shared knowledge," she proposes discourse functions for desyoo and demonstrates that direct translation of desyoo as a tag question in contexts of shared knowledge may have negative consequences in English.
Hasunuma and Cook focus on the discourse and interpersonal function of sentence final particles. Hasunuma's analysis focuses on the discourse functions of sentance-final particle yo. Cook analyzes constraints on the sequential occurrence of ne, yo, wa, zo, ze and nominalizer no and shows that gender distinctions associated with particle collocations reflect male and female images in Japanese society.
Ryoko Suzuki, University of California, Santa Barbara
A number of studies point out that Japanese has rich morphological devices to encode pragmatic information. One curious fact is that these morphemes occur clause finally. For example, so-called sentence final particles express the speaker's certainty or affective stance toward the proposition clause finally; the honorific morphology expresses the social distance between the speaker and the referent after the verb stem, i.e., the clause final position in Japanese. In this paper, I will discuss two case studies in which the morphemes are changing their categorical status in the grammar of Japanese and grammaticizing to clause final pragmatic morphemes.
First, Japanese has a verb shimau meaning "put away/finish," which has been grammaticized to an auxiliary teshimau (or rather, a verbal suffix chau) occurring after the verb stem, and is often documented as an aspectual morpheme indicating the completion of an event, which is related to its original lexical meaning. Interestingly, the analysis of teshimau / chau in conversational discourse suggests that its meaning has changed from the domain of propositional semantics to pragmatics along with its grammaticization from a lexical verb to a verbal suffix (i.e., its occurrence moving closer to the edge of a clause), it has come to express various speaker stances: negative or positive attitudes about the occurrence of an event, or the attitude that the event occurred automatically beyond his/her control or volition (e.g., sonna koto made itchau n da. "[he] even says chau such a thing!" <NEGATIVE>).
Secondly, there is a group of nouns called keishiki meishi (lit., formal nouns), some of which are taking the path of grammaticization to final particles, by expressing pragmatic meanings rather than their lexical meanings. The most frequent is wake, lit., "reason" in conversational data does not function as a lexical noun, but almost exclusively functions as a clause final pragmatic morpheme indicating that the speaker has knowledge/experience that the hearer does not have access to. It occurs in situations such as convincing someone, argument, and story telling (e.g., tachiba o hakkiri sasetekita tte iu wake yo. "[he] consistently has been making clear his standpoint [he] claims wake").
These case studies illustrate curious phenomena in Japanese in which lexical items start to function as pragmatic morphemes at the end of a clause, indicating various speaker stances, regardless of their original parts of speech. It contributes to our understanding of the dynamic nature of language.
Masaru Inoue, The National Language Research Institute, Japan
Negative questions in Japanese can be analyzed into two types, the "analytic" type nai ka/masen ka and the "synthetic" type NAIKA/MASENKA. In the synthetic type, NAI and KA are fused together and NAIKA/MASENKA functions as a complete independent modal form in proposals, requests, wishes, expressions of concern, or conjectures.
These two types of questions have "opposite" functions. Analytic negative questions function as normal yes no questions, and are used to confirm whether a negative assumption is true or not, i.e., whether or not a positive assumption is excluded from the context at the speech time.
In contrast, the basic function of synthetic negative questions is to reintroduce a positive (or negative) assumption in contexts where it appears to have been excluded. All the meanings of synthetic negative questions can be derived from this "revival of excluded assumption" function.
The contrasting functions of these two types of negative questions are illustrated in (1).
(1) (A and B go out for a beer after work regularly.)
A: Sigoto mo owat ta si, biiru-demo nomi ni ikoo ka.
"Work is over. Shall we go for a beer or something?"
B: Warui kedo, kyoo wa korede.
"Sorry but I have to go straight home today."
A: Are? Kyoo wa nomi ni ika nai no? (analytic)
"What? Do you mean you're not going to go out to drink today?"
(Speaker A wants to know whether or not the positive assumption is excluded.)
B: Un, kyoo wa yame te oku yo.
"Well, today I'll pass."
(Speaker B excludes the positive assumption.)
A: Sonna koto iwa zu ni, issyo ni ika NAIKA? (synthetic)
"Don't say that, won't you go with me?"
(Speaker A reintroduces the positive assumption.)
Polly Szatrowski, University of Minnesota
Previous sentence level analyses have viewed desyoo, roughly equivalent to an English tag question, as an epistemic modal. These analyses suggest that desyoo expresses the speaker's inference (Teramura 1984), is the 'TENTATIVE equivalent of desu...indicating probability, lack of certainty, imprecision and/or indirectness' (Jorden with Noda 1987:150), is used in relation to the speaker and hearer's territories of information (Kamio 1990), and belongs 'to a semantic domain outside the speaker's direct experience' (Akatsuka 1990). Along a similar vein, Kinsui (1992) identifies one function of desyoo (Daroo1) as that which draws an inference about knowledge not in the speaker's direct experience. These analyses fail to account for uses of desyoo in a broader discourse context.
Two potentially more useful analyses have been developed by Kinsui (1992) and Hasunuma (1993). Kinsui (1992) suggests that desyoo has a second function (Daroo2), which is to transmit information by drawing the hearer's attention to or making the hearer recall information that she/he may not know or has forgotten, thus inferring that it exists in the speaker and hearer's knowledge base. Hasunuma (1993) claims that uses of desyoo which are interchangeable with zya nai ka share the function of "evocation of shared knowledge."
Building on Kinsui and Hasunuma's analyses, I analyze the function of desyoo in the larger discourse context in relation to participant goals and roles in the co production of conversational stages. Based on 25 hours of taped Japanese telephone conversations, I demonstrate how desyoo functions to organize information in the discourse, specifically by providing the base upon which the speaker makes his/her position clear. In discourse, where a possible conflict exists, such as a potential refusal or a disagreement, speakers present relatively obvious information in the desyoo construction before going on to make their point. In doing so, they obtain agreement from their co-participants before going on to present a potentially conflicting opinion.
Thus the use of desyoo can be viewed as providing a base upon which more pointed comments are made. Rather than pointing to or evoking shared information, it provides an opportunity for agreement and thereby maintains harmony in the discourse in situations which are potentially face threatening.
Haruko Minegishi Cook, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
The Japanese sentence final particles have been studied by a number of linguists. Most of the studies focus on one single particle. However, in examining natural conversations and other spoken genres, often particles occur not alone but in collocations. Collocated particles are occasionally mentioned in the literature of child language acquisition in Japanese (e.g., Horiguchi 1979; Yamada 1980; Seki 1986) and in the literature of Japanese sociolinguistics (e.g., Ide 1979; Hori 1981). In these studies, most of the descriptions of collocated particles concern gender differences in speech. They classify which collocations indicate male or female speech but do not attempt to explain why those particular collocations have those meanings. Furthermore, these descriptions do not explain why many of the collocated particles are used by both genders.
The goal of this paper is twofold: i) to propose a framework for interrelating particles and ii) to explain the association of the collocation of particles and gender distinctions in speech. This paper examines the Japanese sentence final particles ne, yo, wa, zo, ze, as well as the nominalizer no. First, it attempts to systematically categorize the particles and clarify the constraints on their sequential occurrences and then proposes a framework for interrelating them. The framework consists of nominal and verbal sentences as core features, which are modified by head modifier and additive relations. Using this framework, the paper goes on to explain that the gender distinction associated with the collocated particles is a reflection of the images of males and females in Japanese society indexed by the collocated particles.
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