Japanese discourse markers and the communication of emotions
- linguistic semantics and pragmatic inference Ryoko Sasamoto
University of Salford, UK
(R.Sasamoto@pgr.salford.ac.uk)
It is often claimed in descriptive studies that discourse markers can communicate the speaker’s
emotions/attitudes. For example, a Japanese discourse marker yahari is often said to be a modality
expression which communicates the speaker’s attitude/emotion. Similarly, the use of dakara can
communicate the speaker’s irritation in some cases. Although the presence of these ‘emotional’
meanings of discourse connectives is widely acknowledged, there are little studies of why and
how these emotions/attitudes are communicated. Indeed, many discourse analysts such as
Schiffrin (1987) and conversational analysts like Maynard (1993) often analyse the behaviour of
discourse connectives only by describing various functions of the connectives according to levels
of communication, such as semantic, pragmatic, discourse or interactional level. The problem is
that they tend not to make any distinction between what is really encoded by an expression and
what is pragmatically/inferentially derived. As a result, they cannot explain why a certain
discourse connective such as Japanese yahari communicates an arrogant attitude in some cases but
not in others. In this paper, I will show how relevance theory provides a cognitive basis for
distinguishing between linguistically encoded information (linguistic semantics) and information
inferred from the linguistically encoded meaning together with contextual assumptions (pragmatic
inference). In particular, I will argue that the emotions/attitudes which have been accommodated
with the discourse markers can be derived from the constraints on interpretation which each
discourse marker encode, together with the assumptions about the particular context in which they
are used. The consequence of this analysis is that cognitively grounded linguistic semantics can
provide a basis for the analysis of a pragmatically inferred meaning and thus we do not need to say
that these expressions are ambiguous between an ‘emotional’ interpretation and a ‘normal’
interpretation.
Reference
Maynard, S. 1993. Discourse Modality: Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the Japanese
Language. Amsterdam. John Benjamins
Shiffrin, D. 1988. Discourse Markers. CUP