Japanese Sentence-Final Particles: A Pragmatic Principle Approach

Abstract

This study shows that SFPs are something that the speaker uses to represent himself as having a certain attitude (i.e., certain beliefs and intentions), and their uses contribute to the inference process: The speaker uses a SFP to achieve his goal, and assumes that the addressee also believes that the speaker has a goal and believes that whatever the speaker does (including the speaker's choice of a SFP) is relevant for the speaker's goal. Given an utterance with a SFP, the addressee, who assumes that whatever act the speaker performs is relevant to the speaker's goal, infers that the speaker intends to convey something by the fact that the speaker uses a particular SFP in a given situation.