Asia-Pacific Week 2006 Japanese Studies Graduate Summer School ABSTRACT

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This study examines the 'overt expression' of first person subject (1PS) and second person subject (2PS) in Japanese conversational discourse from a pragmatic point of view. In Japanese, 1PS/2PS are frequently omitted in face-to-face conversation. This phenomenon has been studied mainly from the perspective of 'ellipsis', in a number of studies (Kuno, 1978; Hinds, 1982; Nariyama, 2003; among others). However, in fact approximately 80% of 1PS/2PS in Japanese conversation is dropped, which suggests that omission of 1PS/2PS can be regarded as a basic tendency. With this tendency in mind, this study regards the overt expression of 1PS/2PS as marked, and investigates the function and linguistic environments of overt 1PS/2PS; i.e. why and in what environments 1PS/2PS are sustained while they are expected to be omitted as the general tendency in Japanese spoken conversations.

Two points are focused on in this study. One is the relationship of overt 1PS/2PS with discourse management. It is found that the use of 1PS is a useful strategy for the speaker to take the 'floor', and the use of 2PS is a strategy for giving the floor to the other party. The other focus point is the relationship of overt 1PS/2PS with politeness. Overt expression has been treated as more polite than non-overt expression in some studies (Kuno, 1978; Makino, 1980), while it has seen as less polite in other studies (Okamoto, 1985; Okazaki, 1994). Examination of different predicate types with the occurrence of 1PS/2PS demonstrates that overt expression itself does not directly govern the degree of politeness. A fundamental property of overt 1PS/2PS is the 'emphatic' function, by which the speaker's responsibility for or commitment to the utterance is explicitly expressed, and hence the tone of the utterance is increased. Through this property, overt 1PS/2PS sometimes affects the degree of politeness.

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