話題を提示するメタ言語表現 -表現教育の視点から-

Abstract

An overview on the studies of meta‐lingual phrases in Japanese reveals that most of them were conducted using utterances found in official speeches, academic presentations and debates as their research data. The examples of meta‐lingual phrases are slightly different from those used in daily conversations. Categorizations of those phrases were done, but further examination of each category has not been done well enough, which makes the application to Japanese language education still quite difficult. In this essay, the author focused on one category named “meta‐lingual expressions of topic reference”，and examined 123 examples taken from 9 Japanese TV dramas. She examined their syntactic and semantic features, roles in discourse and purposes of their usages. Firstly, the syntactic feature of “meta‐lingual expressions of topic reference” turned out to be a few types of phrase patterns. They are mainly [nouns + da] and [nouns + ga aru]. The core part of the phrases is a noun in many cases. Nominalized verbs in [verb + koto] are also used in some cases. Patterns of [nouns + da] and [nouns + ga aru] are found in two types of realization; one is “nouns + da.” and “nouns + ga aru.”, and the other is “nouns + no da ga or kedo,”, “nouns + ga aru (no) da ga,” and ”nouns + ga atte,” . Secondly, when referring to the topic, the meta‐lingual phrases do so either by showing the existence of the topic itself or by showing the things related to it or the actions related to it. Things related to the topic are “contents” , “substance”, “sort 1”, “time 1”, “figure 1”, ”order”, “quantity” and “source”. Actions related to the topic, are “sort 2”, “time 2”, “figure 2” and “place”. Among the 12 kinds, six of them, namely “sort 1/2”, ”figure 1/2”, ”substance” and ”contents” are most frequently used. Thirdly, the most important function of “meta‐lingual expressions of topic reference” is “starting discourse”. The following discourse functions are to be found: deepening the talk, pushing the conversation forwards, encouraging a further talk, inserting another topic, introducing an irrelevant topic, interrupting the conversation and changing the topic. Lastly, the most eminent feature of the usage is to be identified when the phrase is uttered from the sender to the recipient. Cases in which the phrase is used from the recipient to the sender and from the third person to the recipient are also found. The purpose of the first type of usage is “leading the recipient’s comprehension of the information in a cognitive way”, leading the recipient’s comprehension of the information in an affective way “,”raising the recipient’s attention”, “asking for the recipient’s consideration or forgiveness” and “giving the recipient the initiative of conversation to avoid taking the responsibility”. The purpose of the second type is “searching for a chance to join the communication” and “taking a step into the core of the matter”. The purpose of the third type is“giving the sender a chance to begin a talk again”. The results of the research stated above can provide Japanese language learners with a big clue in searching for a better support of learners’ comprehension and production of meta‐lingual expressions and communication in general. When guided adequately, learners can deepen their comprehension of meta‐lingual expressions by starting from decoding the syntactic pattern of them and moving gradually to their content, function and finally by identifying participants of the conversation and their intention. The number of the examples of meta‐lingual expressions the author collected in this essay is not yet enough, so it is necessary to add more data and to continue to analyze them. It is also important to examine the data from the viewpoint of politeness studies, and to conduct a research on application of the study to education of Japanese as a second or foreign language.