Overview

Within the field of Japanese linguistics, few areas have generated as much controversy as the morpheme wa; traditionally described as a marker of old or contrasted information, its function as a discourse marker has also been studied. This work aims to deepen the understanding of wa through careful examination of the particle at both sentence and discourse levels in old Japanese as well as present-day Japanese. Previous studies have concentrated on syntactic analyses of wa. The contributors to this volume challenge the old approach and uncover new properties of wa. The four topics discussed are: wa in Narrative and Expository Discourse; wa and other Syntactic Phenomena; Historical Perspectives on wa and Pragmatic Perspectives on wa.

Full Product Details

Author:   John Hinds ,  Shoichi Iwasaki ,  Senko K. Maynard
Publisher:   John Benjamins Publishing Company
Imprint:   John Benjamins Publishing Company
Volume:   14
Weight:   0.420kg
ISBN:  

9780915027989

ISBN 10:   0915027984
Pages:   307
Publication Date:   01 January 1987
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

1. Preface; 2. Part I: Wa in narrative and expository discourse; 3. The use of wa as a cohesion marker in Japanese oral narratives (by Clancy, Patricia M.); 4. Thematization as a staging device in the Japanese narrative (by Maynard, Senko K.); 5. Thematization, assumed familiarity, staging, and syntactic binding in Japanese (by Hinds, John); 6. Identifiability, scope-setting, and the particle wa: A study of Japanese spoken expository discourse (by Iwasaki, Shoichi); 7. A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrenceand Faulkner (of course, in Japanese translation) (by Kuroda, S.-Y.); 8. Part II: Wa and other syntactic phenomena; 9. The role of wa in negation (by McGloin, Naomi Hanaoka); 10. Wa and the WH phrase (by Miyagawa, Shigeru); 11. Part III: Historical perspectives on wa; 12. Functions of the theme marker wa from synchronic and diachronic perspectives (by Ueno, Noriko Fujii); 13. Wa in diachronic perspective (by Wolf, Charles M. De); 14. Part IV: Pragmatic perspectives on wa; 15. How relevant is a functional notion of communicative orientation to ga and wa? (by Makino, Seiichi); 16. Abbreveations

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