Claiming your territory: discourse strategies in Japanese

The field of Japanese modality has received a large amount of attention over the past several decades. In particular, the class of works commonly known as sentence-final particles (SFPs) has been of interest to a wide range of researchers. However, despite years of work a consistent analysis of SFPs and related aspects of Japanese modality has yet to emerge. This problem is compounded further by the unfortunate inaccessibility of a large portion of work done by native grammarians and other scholars in Japan. This thesis has two main objectives. The first is to provide critical summaries of the work of several prominent researchers in the area of Japanese evidentiality. In particular, I will critically examine the most recent work done in the field of “territory of information,” including the most recent framework in the field and several prominent criticisms of the program. The second objective is to present a model of some Japanese sentence-final particles that are generally believed to index evidentiality. The model proposed incorporates and expands upon the findings in the literature. I will propose a distinction made by speakers between information that they expect others to be aware of and information that they actually are aware of. Based on this distinction, as well as the concept of “territory,” a wide range of Japanese modals will be accounted for.