The Japanese Copula Forms and Functions [Hardcover]

In this innovative study, Professor Narahara offers a multi-disciplinary description of the Japanese copula, revealing it to be at the interface of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Most striking is her discovery of the copula's function to express the speaker's knowledge or ignorance about the proposition of the sentence. She provides a new morphological feature analysis to derive this modal function and further proposes a series of unified accounts for a wide range of discourse phenomena.Acknowledgements PART ONE: CONCEPT OF COPULA Introduction to Japanese Copula Copula as a Universal Notion PART TWO: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS: THE VIEW FROM FEATURE MORPHOLOGY Grammatical Feature Representation Against Overt Present Tense Feature Morphology Categorial Marking Analysis PART THREE: EVOLUTION OF INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY Categorial Forms in a Diachronic Perspective Forms and Functions of Modern Copula Da Discourse Functions of Da and Zyanai Index

'...a wonderful and innovative study.' - Professor Ken-ichi Takami, Tokyo Metropolitan University

'I would strongly recommend [this book] to anyone who is interested in knowing more about this small grammatical creature in Japanese.' - Seiki Ayano, Journal of Linguistics

TOMIKO NARAHARA is Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Linguistics and Director of the Japanese Language Programme at the University of California, Santa Barbara.