THE JAPANESE COPULA: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS

Extract

THE JAPANESE COPULA: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS. Tomiko Narahara. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. x + 210. $55.00 cloth.

This book examines the Japanese copula, da and datta, which occurs with predicative nominals and adjectival nominals. Narahara's primary contribution is to challenge the common assumption that the Japanese copula is a tense feature carrier (p. 12). She points out in chapter 4 that copula-less sentences such as Kwoo-wa nitiyoobi “Today is Sunday” and Kita-wa kotti? “Is north in this direction?” can still be interpreted with the present time reference. She proposes that, although the morpheme ta in datta encodes the past reference, the copula form da does not encode the present tense. In chapter 10, she shows that the copula form da is systematically excluded when the speaker lacks knowledge of the truth of the sentence. For example, the copula form never appears in yes/no questions such as Kwoo-wa doyoobi *da/Ø? “Is today Saturday?” and sentences with epistemic modals such as Yuuta-wa genki *da/Ø rasii “Yuta seems to be well,” whereas it is perfectly acceptable for the copula form da to occur in normal declarative sentences such as Kwoo-wa doyoobi da “Today is Saturday.” She suggests that the copula da is a modal expressing what she calls the anti-ignorative affirmative mode, and it is the anti-ignorative mode that makes the copula incompatible with yes/no questions and sentences with epistemic modals. Finally, in chapter 11, she discusses cases where the copula form da in normal declarative sentences alternates with the zero-copula. She concludes that the zero-copula is a device to tone down utterances and is used when the speaker attempts to make the expression less assertive and authoritative. This explains why women or children tend to use the zero-copula even in normal declarative sentences.