Involvement and Attitude in Japanese Discourse

This book addresses the long discussed issue of Japanese interactive markers (traditionally called sentence-final particles) in a new light, and provides the comprehensive linguistic documentation of the interactional functions of seven interactive markers: ne, na, yo, sa, wa, zo and ze. By adopting three key notions, ‘involvement’, ‘formality’ and ‘gender’, the study not only reveals the functions and pragmatic effects of each marker, but also sheds light on some fundamental issues of the nature of spoken discourse in general, including how speakers collaborate with each other to create and sustain their conversations and how linguistic functions of verbal forms interface with sociocultural norms. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of linguistic fields such as Japanese linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and applied linguistics and to teachers and learners of Japanese and of a second/foreign language.

Satoko Suzuki, Macalester College, in Corpus Pragmatics Vol. 2 (2018):
The book provides an invaluable contribution to the study of Japanese grammar and discourse. [...] The book is an important read for both linguists working on Japanese and language learners as it offers thorough and accurate as well as accessible characterizations of the particles.