Directive acts as part of a quotation in Modern Japanese speech

Abstract

In this paper, we consider directive acts as part of a quotation in Modern Japanese speech. Using the texts of electronic diaries as a kind of written expression of conversational discourse, we studied the ways of transmitting directive acts as part of a quotation, as well as to analyzed how the choice of a certain form of expression of directive acts as part of a quotation may indicate the direct or indirect nature of the citation. After giving a preliminary theoretical picture, we turn mainly to the direct (morphologized) imperative forms of the Japanese language. These forms are enough to show the complexity of the directive category in the "polite" language of the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun. In any case, the analysis of morphologized forms inevitably moved to the syntactic-discursive level. The peculiarity of the approach is in the analysis of several texts by one author to determine the language techniques characteristic of this author, which is used, among other things, as an argument in favor of direct or indirect citation, since Japanese (as well as for a number of other languages) is characterized by a rather complex, subtle distinction between direct and indirect ways of transmitting someone else’s speech. The material convinces us that only a complete analysis of both the quotation itself and the context (for example, texts by the same author) allows us to get a more accurate picture of the phenomenon of the distinction between direct and indirect citation. Among other things, the conducted research has the theoretical significance in terms of thinking about the phenomenon of quoting in language in general. It is clear that this phenomenon (especially in the light of modern information-polymodal, postmodern and other trends, in particular trends in the psychologization of discourse) should be understood more difficult, as new research in this field proves, and as our paper shows