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Thetics and Categoricals
Edited by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss and Yasuhiro Fujinawa
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 262] 2020
► pp. 351–386

Perception description, report and thetic statements

Roles of sentence-final particles in Japanese and modal particles in German

| Gakushuin University

This paper aims to explain the relationship between thetic statements and two groups of particles, i.e. Japanese sentence-final particles (sfps) and German modal particles (mps). Thetic statements are generally associated with predicates of temporary states, verbs of existence or verbs of appearance. By examining the properties of predicates in thetic statements, I argue that perception description is a key characteristic for theticity. I propose a common representational framework (Pragmatic Function Representation; PFR) and a distributional map (Spectrum for Persons Involved and Reference Points; SfPI&RP) to capture commonalities and differences of sfps and mps. What is common in the use of sfps and mps is that they both can contribute to form a speech act directed to addressees (report), so that the sentences thus formed are non-thetic. Most sfps contribute to convert private expressions into public ones, which is not the case in German mps.

Keywords: description, report, thetic statement, sentence-final particle, modal particle, private and public expression
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Three problems of ga
    • 2.1Two functions of ga
    • 2.2 Ga and property of predicates
    • 2.3 Ga … teiru construction for description
  • 3.Commonalities and differences of sfps and mps
    • 3.1General view
    • 3.2Commonalities of sfps and mps
    • 3.3Three different features of sfps
    • 3.4A common framework for mps and seps: Pragmatic Function Representation
  • 4.Private vs. public expressions
  • 5.Thetic statements and roles of sfps and mps reconsidered
    • 5.1Thetic statements and roles of sfps
    • 5.2Thetic statements and roles of mps
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.262.13oka
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