2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Descriptive Research on Pragmatic Principles of Japanese Passive Construction; Structural Meaning and Implicatures
| Project/Area Number |
17520254
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Linguistics
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| Research Institution | Hokkaido University |
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Principal Investigator |
KATO Shigehiro Hokkaido University, Graduate School of Letters, Associate Professor (40283048)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2005 – 2007
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| Keywords | Dynamic Context / Viewpoint Addition / Viewpotint Integrity / Nuisance Connotation / Constructional Implicature / Promotion / Demotion / Weak and Strong Boundaries / Discourse memory / Long-term Memory |
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| Research Abstract |
This research dealt with the Japanese passive construction and clarified its syntactic structure and semantic function in a pragmatics-centered way, which finally brought us the results as follows. 1) Two types of boundaries can be recognized in Japanese complex predicate; morphologically strong and weak boundaries. 2) In Japanese, alternations in the distribution of case-markers correspond to the passive construction categories. 3) Promotion and demotion in case marking in Japanese were defined clearly, which leads to the distinction between direct and indirect passives. 4) Indirect passive requires pragmatically the person(s) of viewpoint. Japanese has three different ways of processing the viewpoint in indirect passives; addition, integrity and transition. 5) Some constructions in Japanese have the intrinsic implicatures of their own, which can be cancelled through adding another presupposition. 6) Constructional implicatures are classified into two types; strong implicature, which are difficult to cancel, and weak implicature, which is easy to cancel. 7) Context is defined reductively, which has been so far dealt with deductively only. Formal, situational, knowledge and secondary contexts are prepared for dynamic analysis of pragmatics. 8) The four categories of context are defined in relation to our memory system, which is supposed to consist of three stages; processing memory, discourse memory and knowledge memory (long-tem memory). 9) Japanese language has several pragmatic markers, which shows the quality of information stored in knowledge memory.
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Research Products
(10 results)
