Metarepresentational phenomena in Japanese and English: Implications for comparative linguistics

Seiji Uchida
Nara University
Abstract

Contrastive studies of languages usually focus on differences in lexical items, syntactic structures, semantic expressions, collocations, and so on. In the present paper we take a cognitive pragmatic approach, assuming that metarepresentation in the sense of Sperber (2000) and Wilson (2000) offers a crucial perspective in such studies. We discuss how the speech act component of higher-level explicatures is linguistically realized in Japanese and English, focusing on sentence adverbials, ‘because’ clauses, speech act particles, reported speech, private predicates, and desiderative predicates. We conclude that in the Japanese language, information concerning the speech act component tends to be linguistically realized, while such information is not necessarily realized in English. We suggest that this cognitive pragmatic approach can be applied to other languages where higher-level explicatures are basically explicit as in Japanese or implicit as in English.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 21 November 2021

Date accepted: 17 January 2023

Published online: 16 May 2023

Table of contents

Grice (1989) distinguishes ‘what is said’ from ‘what is not said,’ referring to the latter as ‘implicature.’ However, the distinction is not so simple: ‘what is said’ and ‘what is not said’ are not actually complementary to each other. We must also take into account what is not said when we interpret ‘what is said.’ In other words, what is explicitly communicated is in fact much richer than ‘what is said.’ Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) coins the word ‘explicature’ on the analogy of ‘implicature’ to cover this innovative view. Explicatures are obtained through the processes of disambiguation, saturation, free enrichment, and ad hoc concept formation (Carston 2002).

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