Seminar om diskurspartikler

The phatic particles deal with relevance, the distal/proximal ones with the hearer’s assumed knowledge, the argumentative ones with the assumed attitudes and views of the hearer and finally, evidentiality is about the position of the source of knowledge in what seems to be a paradigm of ‘person’ (nok 1P, vel 2P,vist 3P). As far as the phatic and distal/proximal sets are concerned, their main function in discourse seems to be that of bracketing information as not relevant to the points pursued by the speaker.

Duck-Young Lee og Naomi Ogi, Australian National University: "Attitudes and involvement of so-called sentence-final particles in Japanese"

This study discusses a group of particles in Japanese, which are often referred to as sentence-final particles (SFPs) among Japanese linguists. The use of SFPs is indispensable to the natural spoken conversation in the language whereas they are hardly found in written Japanese. It was acknowledged in early studies of the modern Japanese grammar that their main function is to express the speaker’s certain concern toward the hearer (e.g. Saji, 1956; Sakuma, 1957; Watanabe, 1968; Suzuki, 1976). However, no intensive investigation has been made to clarify their interactive functions empirically and systematically. The major research trend has been to account for the use of SFPs from the perspective of the state of information that each conversation participant possesses (e.g., Ohso, 1986; Cheng, 1987; Masuoka and Takubo, 1989; Masuoka, 1991; Kamio, 1994, 1997; Ohama, 1996; among others), even though shortcomings of this account were also reported (Cook, 1992; Morita, 2000; Lee, 2007)

In the present study we will focus on ne, na, yo, ze, zo and wa, and account for their role in interactive conversation in terms of involvement and the speaker’s attitudes. To be more precise, their primary function is to invite the hearer’s involvement and indicate the speaker’s various attitudes towards the hearer. The key points are that these particles can be divided into two groups according to the different ways of inviting the hearer’s involvement: (i) incorporative ne, na and (ii) monopolistic yo, ze, zo, wa, and that each particle indicates a different attitude of the speaker within a respective manner, either incorporative or monopolistic.

Hartmut Haberland, RUC: "Danish and Japanese dialogue particles, a tiny Hans Christian Andersen pilot study"

If there is a parallel between Danish dialogue particles and Japanese sentence-final particles (but certainly not a direct one-to-one correspondence between specific particles) one approach to investigating the parallel would be to look at translations from Danish into Japanese. In a very small-scale pilot study I have looked at Japanese translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales available on the web. The relevant cases would be found in direct reported speech, and indeed there is some correspondence between sentences that in the original contain a dialogue particle and a sentence-final particle in the translation. This is not the case in a translation that is not directly from the Danish original but through an English translation, which fits the view that English is one of the languages (and probably the only Germanic language) that does not have any dialogue particles but uses other means of expressions instead (Schubiger 1963).

Maria Schubiger 1963. English intonation and German modal particles – a comparative study. Phonetica 12: 65-84