Japanese Modality: Exploring Its Scope and Interpretation

This book is the first collection of studies on Japanese modality written in English. It presents a review of Japanese modality studies as well as important new material that addresses the issues of its scope, its nature, and its conceptualization. The book offers specialists of Japanese a valuable tool to explore the broad range of perspectives adopted in a long tradition of scholarly inquiry on the subject, such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, SLA, interaction analysis, in synchronic and diachronic, and comparative approaches. Through the study of its instantiation in the Japanese language, the volume raises the ontological question of what modality is and is not, and to what extent research tagged under the same nominal category refers to commensurate phenomena in other languages. This question is relevant to all linguistic research, and this collection of studies on modariti offers a stimulating contrast to existing studies on Western languages.