Chapter 4
A contrastive study of the English and Japanese modality
systems
The main purpose of this chapter is to compare the
modality systems of English and Japanese focusing on the subcategories of
Modalization and Modulation. Since the definitions and the
subcategorizations of modality are different from one researcher to another,
the descriptions depend on the framework. The Systemic Functional framework
is adopted as the main one in the analyses of English and Japanese modality
systems.
Halliday and
Matthiessen (2014) subcategorize the system of Modality of
English into Modalization and Modulation. Further, Modalization is divided
into usuality and probability, and Modulation into obligation and
inclination. Whereas the English Modality system is considered to be quite
simple, Teruya (2007)’s
subcategorization for the Japanese Modality system is far more complex: he
divides Modalization into ability, probability and usuality, and Modulation
into necessity, obligation, permission, expectation and inclination. Fukuda (2016) added evidentiality
to Modalization, and Kadooka
(2016) followed this addition.
Then follow the syntactic analyses of the Modality
expressions in Japanese. There are some positive/negative pairs with the
polarity, such as ‘hituyou ga aru/nai’ (necessity + NOM + exist/does
not, ‘there is necessity to/not to do something).’ One of the
pairs of which the positive and the negative polarity belong to different
categories is the permission ‘si-te mo ii’ (do + also +
possible, ‘you can do’) and the obligatory ‘si-te wa nara-nai’
(do + top + possible-not, ‘you must not do’).
Notice that the negation form ‘nara-nai’ does not have the positive
counterpart ‘*naru’ in the sense that one can do something, which shows that
there is asymmetry between the positive and the negative polarities with
some verbs in Japanese. Together with such asymmetries, the negation
patterns of the Japanese modality expressions are insightful from the
viewpoints of lexicogrammar and semantics.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Syntactic negation and semantic negation
- 3.Modality in English
- 3.1Definitions of modality
- 3.2Modalization and modulation within the framework of SFL
- 4.Modality in Japanese
- 4.1Subcategories of modalization and modulation
- 4.2Positive – negative pairs
- 5.Comparison and conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
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