Forms and functions of interrogative structures: a contrastive study of English and Japanese

Abstract

Cilem teto studie je srovnani forem a funkci interogativnich konstrukci vanglictine a v japonstine s ohledem na kulturne-socialni pozadi obou jazyku. Publikovany byly jednak kontrastivni studie venujici se formalnimu aspektu otazek vanglictine a v japonstine a jednak studie, ktere se soustredi prevazne na funkci v navaznosti na kulturni specifika. Tato prace je pokusem obe hlediska spojit. Formalni popis vychazi pri vymezeni vetneho typu z teorie Sadocka a Zwickyho, standardniho deskriptivniho popisu interogativnich struktur podle CGEL pro anglicky jazyk a podle Nakady pro jazyk japonskY. Kulturne srovnavaci cast je postavena na praci Wierzbicke. Dochazi tak ke spojeni dvou do jiste miry protichudnych smeru, nebot' Sadock a Zwicky zdurazi'iuji univerzalni charakter vetnych typu, kdezto kulturni antropologove a antropolingviste zduraznuji lingvisticke rozdily plynouci z kulturnich odlisnosti. Studie vychazi z analyzy korpusu vytvoreneho excerpci divadelnich her (apendix X), ktere se bezne pouzivaji jako zdroj prirozeneho mluveneho jazyka. Korpus byl sestaven ze 180 vet anglickeho a stejneho poctu vet japonskeho originalu, ke kterYm byly p5i5ayenz prislusne preklady. Vznikly tak dva subkorpusy, ktere byly pouzity v castech I. 3., 11. 1. a 11. 2. Posledni cast 11. 3. cerpa z celeho korpusu bez ohledu na jazyku...

The functional analysis attempted to provide a survey of functions, i.e. illocutionary forces of interrogative structures in the corpus and its sub-corpora and hence compare the scope of functions that are, besides the functions following from the primary semantics of the individual interrogative types, realized by interrogatives main types of the compared languages. The key factor that can, to high degree, determine the outcome of an analysis, is classification. We have combined two approaches, classical Searle's approach and an alternative approach of Wierzbicka, which was devised specifically for cross-cultural pragmatics' purposes. The first part of quantitative analysis pursued overall distribution of the illocutionary forces in the individual sub-corpora regardless of the interrogative types expressing them. As expected both languages used interrogatives in accord with their primary semantics mostly for asking for a piece of unknown information or confirmation or negation of information, i.e. directive RR (request for representative). However apart from this common trend there are some noteworthy tendencies. (see graph D2 in Appendix D). Japanese is quite conservative and uses interrogatives primarily to ask for information, to some degree to express emotions or attitudes and only in a very limited...