Self‐qualification in L2 Japanese: An Interface of Pragmatic, Grammatical, and Discourse Competences

要旨

In Japanese, self‐qualification, or a qualifying segment of talk that reduces the force of the speaker's own utterances, is frequently introduced with contrastive markers, such as demo , kedo , and ga . This study explores the relationship between the grammatical and pragmatic competence of Japanese L2 learners by examining their use of such self‐qualification in a corpus of oral proficiency interviews. It demonstrates that successful self‐qualification is achieved not only by the placement of appropriate connective expressions but also through effective use of foregrounding and/or backgrounding discourse mechanisms. The results indicate a close relationship between pragmatic, grammatical, and discourse competence in learner language.

主題