| Research Abstract |
As linguistic materials for analysing the historical conversations, Takada took German-English and German-French conversation textbooks in the half of the 19th century. From the example sentences (self-introduction, travels, theatergoing, sickness etc.) in the these textbooks, we find particles, address forms and elliptical sentences which give the conversations certain grade of orality. In these conversation textbooks, we can also observe linguistic rituals for various situations (thanking, making requests, complementing and stating objections) that are different from these of today. Focusing on Japanese, Suzuki developed her research on the historical on the change of the quotative particle tte. The conversational data were obtained from novels published in the Edo, Meiji, early Showa and the present, as well as from recorded material. Tte has undergone change from a quotative to a discourse marker expressing the speaker's subjectivity. Also crucial for our analysis is the constructional change involving the positional shift from an utterance-internal particle to the utterance-initial discourse marker. Suzuki plans to continue her analysis on the rise of the concessive function in quotative forms, an interesting and plausible change not previously documented in other languages. Onodera contributed the paper, originally given at the first workshop on Historical Pragmatics in Japan(in December, 2005: "Historical Pragmatics-Possibilities and Difficulties"), to Studies in Pragmatics, published by the Pragmatics Society of Japan. Onodera and Suzuki co-edited the special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Historical Changes in Japanese: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity. In this issue, Onodera published her paper "Interplay of (inter) subjectivity and social norm", exchanging ideas and opinions with many researchers inside and outside Japan, including Dr. E. Traugott and Dr. A. Jucker, during the writing process.
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