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Article published In:
Concepts and Context in Relevance-Theoretic Pragmatics: New Developments
Edited by Agnieszka Piskorska and Manuel Padilla Cruz
[Pragmatics 33:3] 2023
► pp. 436–459

Metarepresentational phenomena in Japanese and English

Implications for comparative linguistics

| Nara University

Contrastive studies of languages usually focus on differences in lexical items, syntactic structures, semantic expressions, collocations, and so on. In the present paper we take a cognitive pragmatic approach, assuming that metarepresentation in the sense of Sperber (2000) and Wilson (2000) offers a crucial perspective in such studies. We discuss how the speech act component of higher-level explicatures is linguistically realized in Japanese and English, focusing on sentence adverbials, ‘because’ clauses, speech act particles, reported speech, private predicates, and desiderative predicates. We conclude that in the Japanese language, information concerning the speech act component tends to be linguistically realized, while such information is not necessarily realized in English. We suggest that this cognitive pragmatic approach can be applied to other languages where higher-level explicatures are basically explicit as in Japanese or implicit as in English.

Keywords: relevance theory, comparative linguistics, metarepresentation, higher-level explicaures, linguistic realization, speech act component
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Realizations of metarepresentations
    • 2.1Metarepresentational adverbials
    • 2.2‘…, because …’ construction
    • 2.3Linguistic realizations of speech acts
  • 3.Realizations of first- and second-order metarepresentations
    • 3.1Reported speech
    • 3.2Metarepresentational information in inflection in Japanese
      • 3.2.1Private predicates
      • 3.2.2Desiderative predicates
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 16 May 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21061.uch
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