Epistemic Modality in the Verb Seem and Related Forms in English and Japanese

概要

論文の詳細を見る
We have dealt with the verb seem and other related forms in English and Japanese in terms of epistemic modality (cf. Palmer 1986) such as appearance, inference, hearsay. Analytic viewpoints reviewed and reconsidered in this paper are as follows: 1) a truth entailment and non-entailment reading, 2) evidentiality, i.e. an implicature of the speaker's direct or indirect experience, 3) a predicational and specificational reading, and 4) the speaker's or other person's judgment in a certain context or situation. Of these four viewpoints, entailment and evidentiality are the main criteria in this paper for comparing the verb seem with related Japanese forms such as rasii, yooda, and sooda in the perspective of epistemic modality. It might be fair to say in most cases that the seem + adj. construction is closer in meaning to yooda than rasii and the seem to be + adj. construction closer to rasii than yooda; from a semantic perspective the It seems that construction can be compared to both rasii and yooda in an "unmarked" usage. In a pragmatic perspective, on the other hand, the usage is not fixed in the least and there seem to be some characteristic tendencies in marked usage which are not taken up in this paper. Finally, the meaning and function of to be in the complement of the verb seem, which were discussed in Takahashi (1991), have been reconsidered and somewhat refined in terms of Langacker's (1991) cognitive approach.