The Japanese Copula: Forms and Functions - Paperback

by T. Narahara (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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