Article published In: Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 25:2 (2018) ► pp.337–362
From justification to modulation
Similarities and differences of after all and datte
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 25 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17028.ots
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17028.ots
Abstract
The English discourse marker after all and the
Japanese discourse marker datte have been commonly claimed to
give a reason or justification to the preceding utterance, and therefore, these
two expressions are regarded as the equivalent translation counterparts to each
other. This paper first attempts to propose that such an equated account is
motivated by these two discourse markers constructing a similar inferential
schema involved in the interpretation of the utterance including them. In fact,
datte and after all make manifest similar
polyfunctions according to the syntactic position although they encode different
lexical information. This is because these two discourse markers are indicators
that contribute to the inferential phase of communication by various degrees of
modulation of a cognitive gap between two different assumptions. Another aim of
this paper is to differentiate a procedural constraint these two indicators
encode on the interpretation of the utterance.
Keywords:
after all
,
datte
, procedural constraint, higher-level explicature, modulation, cognitive gap
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Multifunctionality and syntactic positions
- 2.1
After all
- 2.1.1Clause-final use
- 2.1.2Clause-medial use
- 2.1.3Clause-initial use
- 2.2
Datte
- 2.2.1Clause-final use
- 2.2.2Clause-medial use
- 2.2.3Clause-initial use
- 2.1
After all
- 3.Common inferential schema
- 4.Procedural constraints of after all and
datte
- 4.1Constraints on implicatures and constraints on higher-level explicatures
- 4.2Utterance-initial use of datte
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
References Data references
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