Is discourse made up of sentences? Focusing on dependent grafted speech in modern standard Japanese

The idea that discourse is made up of sentences has been widespread among linguists. Does this traditional discourse perspective (“sententialism”) apply to casual language in daily communication? This paper examines the validity of sententialism by focusing on a type of speech called “dependent grafted speech” in Japanese conversation. Close examinations of various words, phrases, and sentences reveal that dependent grafted speech is different from sentences on two points: (i) Generally, the lexical accent of the copula at the beginning of dependent grafted speech is a high tone; and (ii) the interaction particle at the end of dependent grafted speech is not uttered with a falling intonation unless it is proceeded by a very abrupt rising intonation (“leaping” intonation). These findings cast doubt on the status of dependent grafted speech as a sentence. Moreover, they demonstrate a new conception of discourse as a mixture of diverse constituents, including sentences, dependent grafted speech, and other utterance types.

Discourse functions and pitch patterns of the Japanese interactional particle yo in student-professor conversation

Until recently Japanese interactional particles have largely been investigated in various social contexts without paying much attention to intonation. Building on Shimotani (2006) that examined discourse functions and the intonation yo in informal talk among friends, the current study intends to contribute to interactional particle research by analyzing yo in six sets of one-to-one student-professor conversations. The findings demonstrate that the students and professors exhibited different pitch patterns of yo. Students tended to use yo with a falling pitch [+fall] when performing pre-story-telling, and frequently used the n-desu-yo construction. The professor, on the other hand, often used yo [−fall] when providing opinions or advice. These results will be discussed from Ochs’ social constructive discourse approach perspective. The present study concludes that both discourse functions and pitch patterns in interactional particles are important linguistic resources used to construct speakers’ social personae and stance-building. As such, pedagogical implications will be provided.

The interrogative intonation in the Kunigami dialect of Okinoerabu, Ryukyu

Cross-linguistically, intonation patterns for yes/no questions rise in many languages. However, there are multiple reports of interrogative sentences with falling intonation in Japanese dialects. It is said that five types of interrogative intonation exist in Japanese dialects: rising, where the end of the sentence always rises; falling 1, where the end of the sentence always falls; falling 2, where the interrogative appears morphologically in the sentence, and the sentence falls; complement, where tone in the sentence falls if the interrogative morphologically appears and rises if it does not; and gradual rise, where the tone gradually rises until the end of the sentence. However, the Kunigami dialect does not adhere to these patterns. In Kunigami yes/no questions, the tone falls if an interrogative morphologically appears but reveals a distinctive intonation from a declarative sentence if it does not. Therefore, in the case of Kunigami, the interrogative intonation typology should not be reconstructed on the basis of absolute rise or fall but on the basis of contrast with a declarative sentence.

Correlating cognitive effort and noun role in spoken Japanese

Models of language processing assume that the cognitive cost to integrate a noun with a verb depends on the distance between the noun and the verb. Such models predict that subjects require more cognitive effort than objects in SOV languages, such as Japanese. This study tests that prediction by investigating apparent cognitive effort differences in topic, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and predicative noun usage, using two corpora of spoken Japanese. A cognitive effort index score was determined for each text in the two corpora. The correlations between index scores and usage rates for each grammatical role were determined. Accusative, dative, and genitive noun usage significantly correlated with cognitive effort index scores, but topic, nominative, and predicate noun usage rates did not. These results suggest that the cognitive cost of noun integration depends not only on distance but also on the grammatical role of the noun.

A formal approach to role language: sentence-final particles and the speaker-hearer link

This paper addresses sentence-final items that fall into the category of role language in Japanese and proposes an analysis from a cartographic perspective. To this end, the syntactic and semantic properties of these items are investigated, with particular attention to their distribution concerning root/embedded context and clause type. The investigation shows that the elements under consideration can be classified into three subcategories and that they are all connected to the speaker-hearer link via agreement relationship, on a par with the politeness marker -mas-. It is also argued that only one subcategory, dubbed gender particles, additionally interacts with illocutionary force and clause type of the sentence, similarly to discourse particles. From this study, it is implied that the role language can be studied within the framework of a syntax-discourse interface.