Noncompositional

What better time than now for a little self-promotion? As I mentioned here, my honors thesis, Claiming your territory: discourse strategies in Japanese [pdf] has finally been posting after some post-editing following my advisors’ suggestions. Truthfully, it still needs a lot of work before anyone would (should?) be interested in the stuff I wrote, but I’m putting it up nonetheless.

The gist of it is as I was thinking about the territory of information, I began to wonder about some of its basic assumptions, and particularly about what constituted the “obligatoriness” of particles that were supposed to be basically discourse particles. And furthermore, the findings presented in the works on ToI clashed hard with the basic assumptions of scholars of Japanese discourse like Senko Maynard as well as that of teachers of Japanese as a second language. As an example, the sentence-final particle (SFP) ne ね is generally considered to be used to mark mutually known information (aka common knowledge), and to also have the functions of asking for/giving confirmation. What does ToI say? It says that ne is used when the information (= propositional content) in an utterance is “totally within the territory of the hearer,” or something to that effect. Oh, but wait, there are also so-called optional uses where the hearer can have less knowledge of the information uttered than the speaker, but it’s still okay (or even preferred) to use ne. And there are even cases where… and so on. The range of uses correspond to a rather scattered set of what I call territory configurations, with no apparant connections or relationships between them, no generalizations to be made. And, I continued to think, where is the discourse function coming into play? People like Kamio (and also Yukinori Takubo (田窪行則) and Satoshi Kinsui (金水敏), who came up with Discourse Management theory (談話管理理論), a mental-spaces-based model) claim to have a functional orientation, but this is a functionalism that ignores discourse processes and focuses on utterance production; how an interlocutor understands an utterance and reacts to it (or rather, to the speaker who made it) is left untouched. This, I felt, should be an important part of an analysis of SFPs like ne, the misuse of which can lead to disastrous misunderstandings, and the clever use of which can not only convery information-structural meaning, but reinforce social organization and hierarchy. And so I tried to come up with some analysis of common SFPs (yo, ne, and daroo) that drew from some of Kamio’s findings, but that also drew from some more traditional discourse-functional analyses, which Kamio was generally silent on.

How much of that I actually accomplished is left to the reader to decide. My personal vote: bzzzt - try again next round.