LINGUISTIC CODING OF EVIDENTIALITY IN JAPANESE SPOKEN DISCOURSE AND JAPANESE POLITENESS by Nobuko Trent, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 1997 Copyright 1997 by Trent, Nobuko All right reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. Theories of linguistic evidentiality 26 Chapter 3. Discourse modality in Japanese 69 Chapter 4. Methodology 114 Chapter 5. Model of Japanese evidentiality 188 Chapter 6. Japanese linguistic politeness and evidentiality 338 Chapter 7. Conclusion 412 Bibliography 432 GRAMMATICAL ABBREVIATIONS ABL ablative case (kara) ACC accusative particle (o) AD HON addresee honorifics AUX auxiliary CAUS causative affix (sase) CNT contrastive (wa) CONF sentencial particle for confirmation (ne) COMP sentencial complementizer (no, koto, etc.) COND conditional affix (to, tara, eba, nara) CONJ conjecture (daroo, etc.) COP copula (da, desu) DAT dative particle (ni) DES desiderative affix (tai) DIR directional case (e) EMP emphathetic FOR formal (=AD HON) GER gerund affix (te) HON honorific form HYP hypothetical IMP imperative INF infinitive (o, i, ku) INS instrumental particle (de) INJ interjection and hesitation IRR irrealis LOC locative particle (ni, de, e) MODI noun modifier (no) NEG negative morpheme NML nominalizer (no) NOM nominative particle (ga) OBJ object marker (o) = ACC PART sentential particle: VOC, RAPP, CONF, SHAR PASS passive affix PERF perfect affix POSS possessive POT potential affix (re, rare) PROG progressive affix Q question particle (ka) QUOT quotative particle (to) RAPP sentential partical of rapport (ne, wa) REA realis REF HON referent honorifics RES resultative affix (te-aru) STAT stative affix TEMP temporal particle (ni, de) TOP topic particle (wa) VOC vocative sentential particle (yo, zo, ze, sa) VOL volitional affix (yoo) CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION When teaching second or foreign language classes, teachers may often note various phenomena of "language transfer" from a student's native language to the target language. "Transfer" may be seen with any aspect of language. For example, if medicine should always be drunk according to a certain language's grammar, it is likely that a native speaker of the language would "lexically" transfer the expression to drink medicine to his second or foreign language. Language transfer can be phonological, semantic, syntactical, or morphological, and is also seen at the discourse level such as in discourse organization and discourse grammar (cf. T. Odlin, 1989). It is presumable that a language learner also "pragmatically" transfers the "viewpoint" (i.e., the way reality is viewed) of his native language or native culture to his target language. Seeing the same reality, people from different cultural or different linguistic backgrounds might perceive reality in different ways or at least encode their perceptions in vastly different ways.1 Thus, even if it is not the case that perceptions differ, the rules of different languages (prescriptive grammar rules and/or pragmatic rules) certainly must have different emphases in expressing the same reality. While teaching Japanese to American students, in addition to grammatical transfer, I have encountered pragmatic transfer which may be due to the cultural differences between Japan and America or 1 due to the differences between the pragmatic use of Japanese language and that of American English, or most likely due to an interplay of both factors. In the translated Japanese conversation (1-1) below, for example, the speaker presented an extremely low-assertive mode of speech in discussing some religious cult members at large who were suspected to be responsible for the Sarin Poison Gas case in the Tokyo metropolitan subway system in 1995, which instantaneously killed or injured hundreds of people. Rising ( ) and falling ( ) arrows indicate rising and falling tones in the passage: (1-1) F2: (1) ....that person is, what shall I say, in short, did he make (Sarin gas) Well, he made Sarin gas, and should I say he scattered it by himself So, is he a scientist Aren't most of them specialized in that field So, probably, well, most probably, doing research University research institutes do not have much funding generally, so after all, it is said that they entered [the cult group] under the condition that they can do whatever scientific research they wanted to do. You know, it is said that "religion" was a quite different thing for those people. So, it is also said that they went into the cult group only because they had desire to study more than they could have done at graduate school. So should we say they are top class scientists F5: (2) Is that so F2: (3) It is said so. (The Original Japanese transcription of this passage is in note 2.) In the passage, although speaker F2 was talking about that which 2 is generally believed to be true, her "level of assertiveness" is very low. Her utterances sound very unsure in English translation but in Japanese this type of low-assertive speech is acceptable, or even preferred. The speaker used four major techniques to avoid being assertive: (1) use of structurally indirect sentences such as it is said;3 (2) use of questions and tag-questions; (3) use of lexical items with low commitment such as probably and (4) use of hedges (e.g. you know, well, and what shall I say). In my pilot study of "hearsay" speech in English and Japanese (Trent, 1994), Japanese speakers were observed to keep distance between themselves and the topic of their speech by consistently using structurally indirect sentences such as I heard.., I think.., and it seems.. as well as using question sentences and tag- question sentences that appeared to constantly seek for agreement of the hearers.4 Overall, in comparison with an English speaker's hearsay report, Japanese speech was seen as less assertive, and tends to sound more uncertain. Being low-assertive may be accepted as modest and well behaved in Japanese culture, however, this may not always result in being perceived favorably in intercultural communication: the over- use of less assertive speech may be considered "evasive", "irresponsible", "ambiguous", or "dubious" in the norm of other language environments. People may well consider that the less assertive tendency of Japanese speech is simply a "cultural" phenomenon. Language and 3 culture are said to be "interwoven" and there is a view that language structure possibly influences our thought (e.g. Sapir,1929; Whorf, 1956). In this study, I will assume that Japanese indirect and low-assertive speech is primarily a "linguistic" phenomenon, which can be systematically explained through a theory of pragmatics. As a native speaker of Japanese, I intuitively feel the existence of "rules" which tell us how to be appropriately less assertive and indirect in interpersonal communication if we want to be a socially competent person in each speech situation. As Clancy (1986) wrote that "Japanese rely upon indirection in many common social situations especially when they are trying to be polite" (p. 215), the factor that motivates pragmatic rules here is politeness which eventually leads us to the cultural aspect of the Japanese language. The rules for less assertiveness are not so-called a "context-independent grammar", but rather are the rules for "performance" (i.e., "context-dependent interpretation" by Levinson, 1992). Hence, this dissertation is a study of Japanese pragmatics, in particular, a study of less assertiveness in interpersonal communication in the Japanese language. This study investigates the relationship between the language and context that is encoded in the structure of language, and eventually the rules are examined in relation with linguistic politeness behavior in the Japanese cultural environment. SCOPE OF THE STUDY 4 There are certainly numerous ways to be indirect in communication. Theories of pragmatics--speech act and politeness theories, in particular-- provide us with insightful thoughts on this issue (cf. Lyons, 1983, Searle, 1975). This study specifically attempts to explore Japanese pragmatic rules which result in less assertive communication through the "evidentiality" concept, which is encoded in the language structure.5 What, then, is evidentiality? Under his "maxim of quality" for conversational principles, i.e., "Try to make your contribution one that is true", Grice (1967, first published 1975) assumed two submaxims: (1) Do not say that which you believe to be false; and (2) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence (p. 46). Although conformance to these maxims is expected among rational adult speakers, one does not always have solid evidence for what one says; therefore, when a given utterance is not supported by "adequate" evidence, the speaker usually express low-commitment to his proposition in different ways. The study of evidentiality is concerned with how this is done. Evidentiality is generally defined as "the linguistic means of indicating how the speaker obtained the information on which he bases an assertion" (Willet, 1988:55).6 Chafe (1986) viewed evidentiality in a broader way so as to cover "any linguistic expression of attitude toward knowledge" (p. 271). If an individual has direct evidence (e.g. witnessing) on which his assertion is based, he will use direct language forms, while he may speak rather 5 indirectly when his assertion is based on, for instance, folklore. The types of evidence that human beings have (e.g. "attested", "reported", and "inferred") must be universal; however, how to express the difference such as the difference in evidence types, and the difference in "degree of certainty" must vary across languages. Based on these thoughts, I believe that evidentiality marking can be a useful concept to apply in Japanese indirect, less assertive communication. If Japanese speakers' language behavior is overly indirect from the universal standard concept of evidentiality, there must be reasons behind the Japanese behavior, and this behavior may be systematic enough to form a pragmatic rule.