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Article published In: Periphery – Diachronic and Cross-Linguistic Approaches:
Edited by Yuko Higashiizumi, Noriko O. Onodera and Sung-Ock S. Sohn
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17:2] 2016
► pp. 282–306

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The development of confirmation/agreement markers away from the RP in Japanese

 | Tokyo Gakugei University, Japan
Published online: 6 April 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.17.2.06hig
In present-day colloquial Japanese, daro(o)/desho(o), the conjectural forms of the copulas that are agglutinated to at the right periphery (RP) of the clause, are detached from the clause and are used as the stand-alone confirmation/agreement markers. This paper explores the developmental pathway from the RP daro(o)/desho(o) to the stand-alone discourse-pragmatic items, addressing how they serve “exchange structure” and “action structure”-related functions in Schiffrin’s (1987) model of discourse coherence. Evidence from corpus studies of these items in the early 1900s and in present-day Japanese suggest that the stand-alone uses developed from their uses at the RP through the anaphor. This paper provides further evidence for Onodera’s (2014, and elsewhere) suggestion that discourse-pragmatic items tend to be recruited from the RP items in the history of Japanese.
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Chen, Jiajun
2018. (Inter)subjectification at the left and right periphery: Deriving Chinese pragmatic marker bushi from the negative copula. Language Sciences 66 ► pp. 83 ff. DOI logo

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