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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the sentence-final particle sa within Relevance Theory. It argues that sa encodes procedural meaning that attributes an utterance’s explicature to shared general beliefs, yielding obviousness and detachment, and explains its incompatibility with evidentials and copula.

Paper long abstract

This paper adopts Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) as its theoretical framework and aims to account for the semantic and grammatical properties of the Japanese sentence-final particle (SFP) sa. It assumes that SFPs encode procedural meaning and contribute to utterance interpretation. On this basis, the paper proposes that sa functions as a marker that attributes the explicature of an utterance to what may be called “general beliefs.”

In this paper, general beliefs are understood as a socially shared body of reflective beliefs, drawing on Sperber’s (1997) distinction between intuitive and reflective beliefs. Attributing an utterance to such beliefs allows the speaker to shift responsibility for the explicature away from the individual self and present it as grounded in shared knowledge. This strategy is assumed to be motivated by the speaker’s attempt to overcome the hearer’s epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010), facilitating acceptance of the explicature.

Under this analysis, the semantic properties traditionally associated with sa, such as obviousness and detachment (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 1951), can be systematically explained. By attributing the explicature to general beliefs, sa presents the proposition as obvious or taken for granted, while signaling reduced speaker commitment. This dual effect gives rise to the detached or observational nuance characteristic of sa.

Furthermore, the paper argues that this attributional analysis provides a unified explanation for two well-established grammatical facts documented by the Japanese Descriptive Grammar Research Group (2003). First, sa is known not to co-occur with evidential modality expressions such as yō da and rashii. Second, sa cannot appear with the copula in nominal predicate sentences. These restrictions are treated not as independent constraints, but as consequences of the attributional function of sa. Since evidential expressions likewise involve attribution, their co-occurrence with sa results in a mismatch in attributional function. Similarly, the attributional use of sa is assumed to be blocked by constraints that the copula imposes on propositional attitudes. In this analysis, the copula in nominal predicate sentences is assumed to restrict the range of propositional attitudes available in utterance interpretation, making the attributional function of sa unavailable in such environments.