Mitigation in disguise: Te-yuu-ka as preface to self-revelation in Japanese dramatic discourse

Abstract

This paper examines the effect a Japanese pragmatic connective te-yuu-ka ‘(lit.) should I say that’ brings to dramatic discourse. The discourse examined is Beautiful Life, a television drama series broadcast in Japan from January through March 2000. I focus on the utterance-initial te-yuu-ka and make a case that it is a prefacing device for one's rather straightforward utterance that expresses deeper, closer-to-true, thoughts and feelings. Unlike utterance-final te-yuu-ka that functions as a mitigating device, and despite the fact that te-yuu-ka is semantically associated with mitigation, utterance-initial te-yuu-ka is related to mitigation in disguise only. More specifically, I argue that utterance-initial te-yuu-ka reclaims self's and others' prior utterances as the speaker reshapes and transforms them for the purpose of ensuing self-revelation. This paper illustrates a case where a linguistic expression brings particular effect to discourse by taking advantage of its disguised meaning.