We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Truncation and backshift: Two pathways to sentence-final coordinating conjunctions.
- Authors
Izutsu, Mitsuko Narita; Izutsu, Katsunobu
- Abstract
This article deals with so-called sentence-final coordinating conjunctions in some dialectal varieties of English and Japanese. It emphasises that such final coordinating conjunctions derive from two syntactically different processes ('truncation' and 'backshift'), and demonstrates that the final conjunctions stemming from each process differ accordingly in syntactic, prosodic, and discourse-pragmatic terms. In both English and Japanese, the backshift type of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions (i) can be fronted to sentence/clause-initial position with no semantic/logical contradiction, (ii) have a sentence-final contour, (iii) do not tolerate being followed by a filler or interjectory particle, and (iv) express emphatic or emotive meanings. On the other hand, the truncation type of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions show the opposite characteristics. The cross-linguistic commonality observed in each of the two types of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions strongly suggests that their discourse-pragmatic meanings are cross-linguistically associated with syntactic/grammatical repertoires, such as truncation, backshift, and sentence-final position.
- Subjects
CONJUNCTIONS (Grammar); SENTENCES (Grammar); JAPANESE dialect literature; PROSODIC analysis (Linguistics); ENGLISH dialect literature; PRAGMATICS
- Publication
Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2014, Vol 15, Issue 1, p62
- ISSN
1566-5852
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/jhp.15.1.04izu