| Sentence-final particles in Japanese have proved notoriously difficult to explain and are especially challenging for second language users. This thesis examines the role of the Japanese sentence-final particles, ne, yo and yone, in talk-in-interaction with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding that accounts for their pragmatic properties and sequential functions and that provides a sound basis for second language pedagogy.; Taking as a starting point the failure of existing studies to provide a clear account as to why the particles occur only in interaction, this thesis argues that the pragmatic properties of ne, yo and yone have an important sequential function---that of indicating how the next turn is to relate to the existing turn. Thus the sentence-final particles have a grounding function and provide speakers of Japanese with a means of realizing the figure/ground properties of turns in talk-in-interaction.; Although the motivation of the present research is pedagogical, the investigator expects this thesis to make a contribution to the rationalistic/empirical debate in pragmatics (Kopytko 1995, 2001 and 2004). The present research clearly illustrates the importance of understanding instances of talk in their sequential context rather than focusing on individual utterances. The study sets out rationalistically in the sense that decontextualized examples are used to set up a Particle Function Hypothesis, and then moves to an empirical stage where naturally occurring talk data are used to test the validity of the hypothesis. The approach followed in this investigation could thus be viewed as an attempt to bring together rationalistic and empirical pragmatic methods. |
