Paper short abstract:

Using recordings of face-to-face and phone conversations as well as excerpts from social media, I show that personal pronouns are regularly employed in post-predicate position as means for affective stance display. As such, they resemble interactional particles, into which they may be developing.

Paper long abstract:

Although Japanese is traditionally regarded as a predicate-final language, in actual interactions, it allows various patterns of turn-constructional unit continuation (Couper-Kuhlen and Ono 2007), including utterance constructions that involve a prosodically integrated post-predicate element and, as such, are clearly planned as non-predicate-final from the start (Zawiszová 2018). One category of elements that commonly occur in the post-predicate position are personal pronouns expressing first- and second-person subjects. While some of them may be viewed as an afterthought or repair, many cannot be explained by referring to the speakers’ referential or discourse-pragmatic needs. Consequently, in light of the marked preference in Japanese for non-expression of first- and second-person subjects (Lee and Yonezawa 2008), their overt expression – coupled with their ‘non-canonical’ position – creates the implication of them being used to ‘do something more’ or ‘something other’ than simple referencing.

In this paper, I argue that what these referentially superfluous first- and second-person pronouns expressed in post-predicate position recurrently do is contribute to the construction of affective stance displays, that is, displays of emotions, feelings, moods, and attitudes, by intensifying the affective stance displays produced by co-occurring resources without specifying them. Speakers employ them when accomplishing various actions and activities, such as, praising, criticising, expressing surprise or irritation, complaining, troubles tellings, and so on. While the pronouns can be postpositionally marked by particles, zero-marking seems prevalent. In addition, zero-marked pronouns serving affective-stance-display-related function tend to be produced within the same intonation contour as the predicate they follow. As a result, they strongly resemble both in their function and in their position the category of interactional (or ‘sentence final’) particles. In fact, they seem to be undergoing the process of recategorization into interactional particles, which would be perfectly in line with what we know about the diachronic development of this category (Fujiwara 1982, 1985, 1986).

The paper draws on interactional linguistics and is based on analysis of my own collection of recordings of spontaneous face-to-face conversational interactions between Japanese young adult friends, telephone conversations included in the TalkBank CallFriend Japanese corpora, and extracts of written conversational interactions on social media.