Quotations and quotation marks in Japanese contexts

概要

論文の詳細を見る
Conversations usually have a context or a perspective with respect to which the content of the discourse can be evaluated. However, the context or perspective is not always uniform. Perspectives/contexts can shift, even during a discourse about a single event, contrary to Kaplan's prohibition against 'monsters', which he claims do not exist in natural language. Elucidation of dynamic communication requires a consideration of how to identify and indicate a perspective/context shift in the middle of a sentence. In English, indexicals are an actual context of speech-dependent expressions such as I, here, and now, but in certain constructions, the interpretation of indexicals can be relative to contexts other than the one in which the utterance is being made, a phenomenon we refer to as indexical shifting. The Japanese language includes dedicated implementations, using quotations, to indicate shifts in perspectives/contexts too. In this paper, I will show that quotations can be used in a certain way to analyze shifts in perspectives/contexts with reference ot Japanese data.