... discourse and spoken discourse. According to the traditional analysis, this particle is used to provide concrete examples to explain abstract ideas. This is ... research, toka, The evolution of Japanese toka inutterance-final position. This volume brings together sixteen in-depth studies of final particles in various languages of the world, offering a rich variety of approaches to this still relatively underresearched class of elements. The volume is of interest to typologists, to experts in syntax and the analysis of spoken language, and to linguists studying the form and function of final particles in single languages. Final particles offers an overview of the different types of final particles found in typologically distinct languages, different methological approaches to the study of final particles, and of typical grammaticalization pathways that these elements have taken in different languages.

Abstract Prescriptivists have been recognizing Conflictive/Contrastive (i.e., “although, but”; the primary dictionary meaning) as the only legitimate function of the Japanese conjunction ga and denouncing all other functions as causes of confusion. However, as is well known by a number of descriptive analyses, non-Conflictive/Contrastive ga uses are common in communicative settings. One recent study analyzed actual ga occurrences in a wide range of discourse settings. Although it successfully identified five ga types according to their pragmatic functions, it failed to examine the pragmatic and discourse functions of Continuative ga (one of the five functions) in a systematic form. This study analyzes pragmatic and discourse functions of Continuative ga to reveal that Continuative ga functions as a discourse marker that indicates the presence of a semantic boundary. Based on findings in the pragmatic analysis and studies on sociocultural characteristics of Japanese communication, variation analysis in this study reveals that Continuative ga frequencies indicate degrees of the addressers' sensitivity to the addressees' potential reactions to their remarks.

This study analyses four women’s speech from Kobe who were interviewed by the same researcher in 1989 and in 2000. We focused on highly indexical pragmatic youth language features (discourse markers and end‐rising intonation) to understand about societal pressures that young women in Japan face when transitioning into adulthood. The analysis reveals a complex picture; some women use them more as time goes by, while others use them less. The vast ethnographic information helps us to understand their persona style (Eckert 2008), and to have an insight into their linguistic capital (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1978, Woolard 2008).

... analysis reveals that the morpheme -te has an inherent dimension of speaker subjectivity to it , reflecting the ... Japanese and why ? ' By ' ecological ' I mean the function of forms and how they interact with other components in ... In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions such as: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language.