日本語母語話者による意見表明の発話末の様相 - 緩和機能と働きかけ機能に着目して -

Abstract

This study aims to analyze how native speakers of Japanese express their opinions in discussions between native speakers and learners of Japanese, based on the occurrence tendency of utterance-final segments. The analysis focused on the two functions of elements included in utterance-final segments: the function to soften the utterance (mitigating function) and the function to actively engage the receiver (conative function). Firstly, for the overall characteristics, the analysis revealed that the utterance-final segments tended to include mitigating functional elements and conative functional elements rather than to be in the form of a simple declarative sentence. Each of these elements often appeared alone in utterance-final segments, while both the mitigating functional elements and the conative functional elements sometimes appeared together in a single utterance-final segment. Secondly, the analysis revealed that the form of "plain form" + to omou ‘(I)think that’ was used only in a small percentage of cases despite the use of the sentence pattern-to omou ‘(I)think that’ amounting to about one third of all expressions of opinion. In many cases, this sentence pattern tended to be used together with the mitigating function elements, such as -kana to omou and -to omou n desu kedo. In addition through an analysis of situations where these utterance-final segments were used the current study found that these utterance-final segments were used to avoid confrontation with the receiver, to soften and convey opposing opinions, and to confirm sharing of the utterance with the receiver. Taken together, these results suggest that native speakers of Japanese choose utterance-final segments of expressing their opinions on the basis of the context in order to maintain a smooth relationship with the receiver.