Japanese reportive evidentiality and the pragmatics of retelling

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the functions of reportive evidential coding in spoken Japanese narrative retelling. Studies of Japanese evidentiality have focused on semantic and pragmatic properties of the range of grammaticalized forms which convey evidential meanings (e.g. Aoki, 1986; Ohta, 1991; Kamio, 1994). There has been less emphasis on why particular evidential forms are selected in specific discourse contexts and how that selection affects the evidential interpretation of the information. The study discussed in this paper differs from previous studies of Japanese evidentiality by taking a particular discourse context, narrative retellings of other people's personal experiences, as the starting point of the investigation. It uses this context to explore not only the frequency of evidential coding in this context but also the range of evidential strategies that are used by retellers when they report information that they know by virtue of hearing it from someone else. The results support a fine tuning of current models of evidentiality in Japanese (esp. Kamio's, 1994, 1995, 1998 theory of ‘Territory of Information’) to take into account not only the presence and absence of overt evidential coding but also the motivations of speakers to choose particular evidential strategies.