The Interactional Consequences of Epistemic Indexicality — Some Thoughts on the Epistemic Marker -kamoshirenai

Abstract

While the grammatical and semantic dimensions of modality have been studied extensively, only a few works have explored its role in actual communication and in social interactions. The amount of research from this perspective has been scarce in comparison to other approaches to modality and even scarcer in the field of Japanese modality. This chapter reviews and summarizes some important works carried out in disciplinary perspectives with an interest in discursive, functional and interactional aspects of language use, and tries to illustrate their arguments through Japanese data. The limited scope of this chapter aims mostly at testing our current understanding of the meaning and function of Japanese modal markers against actual instances of use, and at exploring the potential of qualitative analyses of conversation. The rather cursory discussion I present here is mainly a call for more extensive inquiry into the discursive functions of Japanese modal markers, in socially embedded contexts of use. Three decades ago van Dijk (1981:132) noted the profitless disciplinary segregation of cognitive psychology (which deals with knowledge and belief) and social psychology (which deals with opinions and attitudes). Indeed, with a few exceptions, the study of attitudes in the field of modality has addressed mostly the ‘psychological’ but not the ‘social’. Much more work is to be done regarding how the use of modal markers is constrained by sociocultural norms and practices.