Personal Narratives Spoken by Japanese Native Speakers: The Functions of "tara/soshitara" and the Motives for Using Them in Discourse

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  • 日本語母語話者の体験談の語りについて : 談話に現れる事実的な「タラ」「ソシタラ」の機能と使用動機
  • ニホンゴ ボゴワシャ ノ タイケンダン ノ カタリ ニ ツイテ ダンワ ニ アラワレル ジジツテキ ナ タラ ソシタラ ノ キノウ ト シヨウ ドウキ

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Abstract

This study deals with the discourses that describe the past personal experience (hereinafter“ personal narratives”) spoken by Japanese native speakers. A total of approximately 125 minutes of television talk show programs were analyzed. Among several connectives that appear in the personal narratives, this study focuses on “tara” and “soshitara,” which were the second most frequent connectives after te forms that appeared in the transcripts. This study aims to investigate their functions and the motives of their use. First, the syntactic and semantic features of “tara/soshitara” are sketched. Then, “tara/soshitara” is classified into four usages based on the results of previous studies. The four usages, namely, “hakken” (discovery), “hatsugen” (emersion), “hannoh” (reaction), and “renzoku” (sequential actions), are examined in terms of the information structure, that is, foreground and background in discourse. This study concludes that the most important motive for using “tara/soshitara” in personal narratives is to describe simultaneously a proposition and express the speaker’s evaluation (i.e., “unexpectedness”), which is derived from the syntactic and semantic features of “tara/soshitara.”

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