Japanese Sentence-final Particles Research Articles

Unconventional Usage of Gender-Based Japanese Sentence-Final Particles: A Study of wa and no in Youth Conversations

Japanese society’s traditional gender norms are reflected by sentence-final particles (SFPs) in daily conversation. However, recently, Japanese young people have started to use gendered SFPs in “unclassical” ways. This study mainly examines the usage of the so-called “female” SFPs wa and no by male speakers. In total, 68 cases of wa (43 by male speakers and 25 by female speakers) and 84 cases of no (47 by male speakers and 37 by female speakers) usage were collected from casual conversations of Japanese college students in TalkBank, a public linguistic database. This study demonstrates that the “female” SFPs wa and no are used more frequently by male speakers than by female speakers. Different from the female speakers’ usage to soften the utterances and enhance conversational rapport, wa and no used by male speakers perform other functions. In particular, wa directly indexes self-centeredness, serving the speaker to express emotion, share personal ideas, or perform speech acts such as teasing or amae in a self-focused way, while no directly indexes truthfulness, which allows the speaker to share a story in a vivid tone, reconfirm the speaker’s prior statement, or provide the speaker’s explanation/reasoning in an assertive tone. This study suggests that the new, unconventional gender-based usages of SFPs reveal the social changes in gender dynamics in modern Japanese society, which should not be overlooked in language education.

Commitment Phrase: Linking Proposition to Illocutionary Force

This article provides empirical support for the projection of a Commitment Phrase (CommitP) in the field that maps the conversational pragmatics at the periphery of clauses. Krifka (2015, 2019, 2020) proposes CommitP as a projection that maps the speaker’s commitment to act on the proposition insofar as the speaker has evidence for the truth condition or expects the addressee to produce and commit to such evidence. CommitP replaces Ross’s (1970) idea that the speaker/addressee is related to the proposition by a speech-act predicate such as declare. Krifka argues for the alternative approach primarily on theoretical grounds. This article verifies and validates this proposal on the basis of Japanese sentence-final particles and Romanian speechact particles. We extend our analysis beyond these languages that overtly mark CommitP to English, which does not, by proposing an analysis of so-called biased questions that incorporates CommitP.

An Analysis of Japanese Sentence-final Particle Yone: Compare Yone and Ne in Response

Yone, a Japanese sentence-final particle (SFP), is frequently used in conversation, and some functions overlap with ne, another SFP. However, not much discussion has taken place about their differences. This study argues that the two Japanese sentence-final particles, yone and ne, express a distinction about the speaker's state of mind: yone indicates that an idea has been on the speaker's mind, while ne suggests a thought just emerged into the speaker's awareness. Naturally occurring conversation data provides evidence for this claim. The results show that the particles reflect the speaker's choice of presenting his/her state of awareness.

On and off the common ground: Japanese final particles as (un)grounding devices

The notion of “common ground” (Clark & Brennan 1991; Clark 1996) presupposes communication or conversation as “the basic setting for language use” (Clark 1996: 11). The serialisation of Japanese sentence-final particles is highly sensitive to the likelihood of the relevant utterance being part of the common ground. This paper reconsiders the conception of common ground and grounding processes, investigating monologic as well as conversational discourse. A case study of two modernist texts which contain internal monologue (interior monologue) illustrates how three facets of grounding activities (the establishment, confirmation, and cancellation of common ground) are tactfully realised by means of the final-particle marking of a distinction between monologic and conversational discourse. Our analysis reveals that Japanese final particles (specifically, -ne and -na(a)) play an essential role in encoding the speaker’s intention to ground or unground his/her utterance (i.e., to make the utterance on or off the common ground).

Please remind me: A history of the Japanese particle of recollection <em>kke</em>

The Japanese sentence-final particle kke is a marker of epistemic modality with evidential and mirative overtones. Its most common application is indexing the uncertainty of one’s recollection in interrogative sentences, but in declarative sentences it indexes a reaffirmation of the certainty of the utterance. This study traces the grammatical development of kke from the older Japanese perfect auxiliary -kyeri, citing examples from 8th-century Japanese through today. Through examining kke’s diachrony, it provides evidence that modal sentence-final particles can develop from auxiliaries when the contexts in which they are used become restricted over time.

A study on the intonation of Japanese modal particles “ne” and “yo”

The Japanese sentence-final particles “ne” and “yo” represent modality. These particles are assumed to have several meanings, but the definition of the meanings of them has been an open question. In particular, the relationship between the meaning of these particles and their intonation contours remains unresolved. Therefore, to clarify this, we investigated the meaning of the particles “ne” and “yo” in actual utterances using a questionnaire and analyzed the pitch contours of the utterances acoustically. A Standard Japanese speaker was asked to produce 36 utterances with “ne” or “yo” particles controlling three types of pitch contours, falling, rising and flat. First, we asked 44 Japanese university students (aged 18-24) to judge the “naturalness” of the obtained utterances and to describe their meaning. The results revealed that the particle “ne” tended to have a negative connotation in the case of the falling intonation. Second, the pitch contours of final two syllables of the utterances were analyzed acoustically. The results indicated that the intonation contours differed between the two particles; the rising range was wider in “ne” than “yo”. This was assumed to reflect the different meaning between the two particles. Speech corpus data will be examined to verify above results.

Features of Japanese sentence final particles after L2 acquisition from the view of the interlanguage pragmatics : comparison of colonial Japanese in Korean Chinese

Features of Japanese sentence final particles after L2 acquisition from the view of the interlanguage pragmatics : comparison of colonial Japanese in Korean Chinese

Language and an expression of identities: Japanese sentence-final particles ne and na

This study explores the interrelationship between language and the biographical characteristics of the speaker, including gender, age and social status, by examining the interactional functions of two Japanese sentence-final particles ne and na. A major claim in the literature is that although these particles share some similar functions, they differ markedly in terms of gender, age and social status of the speaker: for example, na is used by male speakers only while ne does not have such a restriction. To date, however, little research has systematically examined their differences, and consequently the use of na including its connection with the speaker's gender, age and social status has also been neglected. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the functions of ne and na by exploring not only their similarities, but also their differences, and sheds light on some aspects of the nature of the identity-language interface. The study will claim that the use of na does not directly indicate the speaker's biographical characteristics. Rather, its special tone of ‘camaraderie’ is closely linked to sociocultural values on gender and formality in the Japanese language, and consequently its use manifests the particular gender, age and social status of the speaker.

The Japanese sentence-final particles in talk-in-interaction: Hideki Saigo, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2011, 281 pp., ISBN 978-9027256096, EUR 95.00 (Hardbound)

The Japanese sentence-final particles in talk-in-interaction: Hideki Saigo, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2011, 281 pp., ISBN 978-9027256096, EUR 95.00 (Hardbound)

Claiming Uncertainty in Recollection: A Study of Kke-Marked Utterances in Japanese Conversation

As part of a growing body of conversation analytic research on epistemics in social interaction, this study explores various uses of the Japanese sentence-final particle kke, which conveys the speaker's claim that she or he has some degree of uncertainty in recalling something from the past. The study aims to demonstrate how “mental” concepts like remembering and forgetting are grounded in, and bound to, communicative actions produced by interactants under the contingencies of everyday situations. To that end, the analysis shows how the act of claiming a particular mental state (i.e., uncertainty in recollection) is, in fact, motivated by such interactional concerns as acknowledging one's own responsibility for knowing something, invoking a particular social relationship with the recipient in bringing up a new conversational topic, and minimizing social disaffiliation when disagreeing with the previous speaker's assertion.

Japanese Sentence-Final Particles as Commitment Markers

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985), pp. 164-174

Function of Japanese Sentence Final Particles yone

Function of Japanese Sentence Final Particles yone

The sentence-final particles ne and yo in soliloquial Japanese

This paper investigates the Japanese sentence-final particles ne and yo as they occur in soliloquy. Because of their pivotal roles in spoken Japanese, these particles have been investigated extensively for decades. However, most previous works have analyzed them solely in terms of communication, invariably assuming the presence of an addressee. In fact, it is not yet widely known that these particles can also occur in soliloquy in which communication with another person is not intended. The present article is the first study to address the significance of ne and yo as they occur in soliloquy and discuss problems associated with hitherto proposed analyses. In order to investigate how communicative and non-communicative intentions influence utterances, an experiment was conducted in which soliloquies of native speakers of Japanese were examined. For ne, this study endorses Takubo and Kinsui’s Discourse Management Model. For yo, Inoue’s account is vindicated.

Decisions, Dynamics and the Japanese Particle yo

I provide an account of the Japanese sentence-final particle yo within a dynamic semantics framework. I argue that yo is used with one of two intonational morphemes, corresponding to sentence-final rising or falling tunes. These intonational morphemes modify a sentence's illocutionary force head, adding an addressee-directed update semantics to the utterance. The different intonational contours specify whether this update is monotonic or non-monotonic. The use of yo is then argued to contribute a pragmatic presupposition to the utterance saying that the post-update discourse context is one in which the addressee's contextual decision problem is resolved. This proposal is shown to account for a range of constraints on the felicitous use of yo, including its restriction to addressee-new and addressee-relevant information in assertions, as well as its behaviour in imperatives and interrogatives.

Dialogue functions of Japanese sentence-final particles ‘ Yo’ and ‘ Ne’

Use of sentence-final particles is one of the most salient features that characterizes the utterance-final position of utterances in Japanese dialogues. We propose an analysis of Japanese sentence-final particles ‘ yo’ and ‘ ne’ in terms of their functions in dialogue coordination. Through the examination of various types of examples, we demonstrate that our analysis not only correctly captures the dialogue specific nature of Japanese sentence-final particles, but it also gives an adequate account of different types of uses of these sentence-final particles, including some of the apparently counterintuitive uses. We further examine the interaction between the sentence-final particles and utterance-final intonational patterns, and argue that sentence-final particles and utterance-final intonational patterns provide Japanese speakers with two complementary persuasion strategies in achieving shared informational and intentional states in her joint activity with the hearer.

Identifying empty subjects by modality information: the case of the Japanese sentence-final particles -yo and -ne

The present study conducted four experiments to investigate how modality information provided through the sentence-final particles -yo and -ne were utilized in identifying an empty subject by native Japanese speakers. Experiment 1 conducted a whole-sentence anomaly decision task, finding that base sentences without -yo and -ne attached were processed more quickly than sentences with either -yo or -ne and that sentences with -yo were processed more quickly than the same sentences with -ne. A delay in processing sentences with -ne was created by the ambiguity of an empty subject identified by -ne as either ‘I’ or ‘you’. In Experiment 2, the auxiliary verb -ou ‘let us’ was added to the base sentence before -yo and -ne, providing a cue to identify the empty subject as ‘we’. Although the base sentences were processed more quickly than those containing the particles -yo and -ne, no other difference resulted from the attachment of these particles. To eliminate the possibility of orthographic-length effects, Experiment 3 compared base sentences with -ou, -ou-yo, and -ou-ne, finding no difference among them (i.e., no ortho- graphic-length effects). Experiment 4 was conducted to further eliminate the possible involvement of discourse-level computation by utilizing base sentences with overt subjects, past tense verbs, and the auxiliary verb -rasii ‘appear to’. Once subjects of sentences were clearly shown, there was no difference among base sentences and those with either -yo or -ne attached (i.e., no discourse-level computation effects). Thus the present study proved that the modality information inherent in the particles -yo and -ne was used for identifying empty subjects.

Japanese epistemic sentence-final particle kana

The Japanese language is known for its sentence-final particles (SFPs hereafter) that express modality. Although modality would seem to be inseparable from context, only a limited number of studies have explicated the nature of SFPs based on data from conversations. This paper discusses the functions of SFP kana, based on 272 occurrences of the particle from over 7 hours of recorded conversation. I propose that kana, which is commonly defined as a doubt marker, frequently functions as a mitigation marker. My investigation also explores how speakers use this function beyond the sentence level. It suggests that traditional descriptions of the syntactic environments in which SFPs occur are not always substantiated by how kana is actually used. Yet, seemingly unsystematic uses of kana are quite systematic in terms of its semantic and pragmatic aspects. These findings suggest that in studying Japanese sentence-final particles, it’s important to study naturally occurring conversations.

Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol. 7 Ed. by Noriko Akatsuka, Hajime Hoji, Shoichi Iwasaki, Sung-Ock Sohn, and Susan Strauss (review)

BOOK NOTICES 225 extensive references, allowing the reader to pursue additional readings. By showing how the P and P framework can be applied to a variety of different languages, the book does overcome the well-known criticism that generative grammar is nanowly preoccupied with English. However, it still does not entirely live up to its title in the sense that the syntax is not as comparative as one might wish (and it is debatable just how new this syntactic theory really is). Not a single language from Papua New Guinea or Australia is discussed in the book, and only three indigenous languages of the Americas are mentioned—Mohawk (Iroquoian), Southern Tiwa (Kiowa Tanoan), and Yuma (Tupi). This is not particularly damning in and of itself, but many of those who have criticized generative grammar for its provincialism will be unsatisfied. [Stuart Robinson, Australian National University.] Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol. 7. Ed. by Noriko Akatsuka, Hajime Hoji, Shoichi Iwasaki, Sung-Ock Sohn, and Susan Strauss. Stanford, CA: CSLI, 1998. Pp. xi, 687. All but 1 of the 39 papers in this volume originated in the Seventh Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference held at the University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles , 8-10 November 1996, the exception being one paper presented at the Sixth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference but, because of a clerical error, omitted from Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol. 6 (ed. by Ho-Min Sohn and John Haig, Stanford, CA: CSLI, 1997). The volume opens with the paper omitted from the previous volume (Chung-Hye Han), and the guest speaker's contribution (Senko K. Maynard). The rest is made up of seven parts: conversation, language and culture, historical linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, syntax and semantics, phonetics and phonology, and demonstrative workshop. The volume ends with a nine-page index. The opening paper by Chung-Hye Han attempts to provide a unified account of the three different readings of the so-called topic marker -(n)un in Korean . In the second paper Senko K. Maynard, based on data from newspapers and girls' comic books, examines functions of self-quotation and other-quotation in Japanese. The six papers in Part 1 deal with discourse or conversation analysis of Japanese: Hiroko Furo on turn-taking in Japanese conversation and related linguistic properties thereof; Matsuko Endo Hudson on the similarities and differences between three Japanese connectives, sorede, dakara, and ja, all translated into English so; Makoto Hayashi and Junko Mori on so-called co-constructions in Japanese and their functions from social-interactional perspective; Tsuyoshi Ono, Eri Yoshida, and Mieko Banno on interactional properties of marked nsing intonation (i.e. hangimonkei) in Japanese; Naomi Hanaoka McGloin on an interactional analysis of Japanese hai and ee, both translated into English yes; and Scott Saft on the distribution and discourse functions of Japanese utterance-initial iya. Part 2 consists of three papers: Shigeko Okamoto on use and nonuse of honorifics between salespersons and customers in Kyoto and Osaka; Susan Strauss and Yong-Yae Park on cultural preferences reflected in Japanese, American, and Korean advertising; and Rodney E. Tyson on the color naming system in Korean and possible social factors that may bear upon the system. The two papers in Part 3 are concerned with Japanese historical linguistics: Peter Hendriks on two syntactic changes in Japanese, i.e. the loss of a focus concord phenomenon and the merger of predicative and attributive verbal forms; and Katsunobu Izutsu on the conelation between form and function in predicative grammatical categones of classical Japanese. Part 4 contains four papers: Akio Kamio on use of the Japanese sentence-final particle ne within his own theory of territory of information; Yoshiko Matsumoto on identification of the Japanese complementizer toyuu as a marker of 'quasi-quotation' ; Yasuhiro Shirai on the functional affinity between the progressive and resultative in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English; and Satoshi Uehara on use ofzero pronouns in Japanese and on related discourse and subjectivity factors. Part 5, with sixteen papers, is the longest in the volume: Daeho Chung on the scope licensing modes of WPs in situ in Japanese and Korean; Yuki Hirose and Soon Ae Chun on ambiguity resolution in Japanese and Korean relative clauses; Hisako Ikawa on the thetic/categorial...

The Japanese sentence-final particle ka: A relevance-theoretic approach

The Japanese sentence-final particle ka: A relevance-theoretic approach

Meanings of non-referential indexes: A case study of the Japanese sentence-final particle ne

Meanings of non-referential indexes: A case study of the Japanese sentence-final particle ne