Sentence Final Modality Markers in Argumentative Writings

--An Analysis of the Corpus of Written Japanese among Native Speakers of

Japanese, Chinese and Korean --

IJUIN Ikuko TAKAHASHI Keiko

To delve into the effectiveness of creating argumentative writings, the authors undertook a contrastive study of sentence final modality markers in Japanese compositions written by native speakers of Japanese (JP), Chinese (CN) and Korean (KR).

The Japanese Learners’ Writing Corpus (Taiyaku Sakubun DB), compiled by the National Institute for Japanese Language (2001), was used. The data employed included: JP 44 (717 total sentences), CN 43 (819) and KR 169 (2952).

The results of the analysis were as follows.

(1) Compared with the others, CN employed more of the “modalities to encourage readers,” such as “interrogative modality” (requesting confirmation), (asking questions); “action modality” (requesting action), (inviting); “deontic modality”; and “communicative attitude modality”.

(2) Compared with the others, JP used more of the “modalities expressing the writer’s inner thoughts,” such as “interrogative modality” (doubting); “epistemic modality” (including “to omou” etc.); and “explanatory modality”.

(3) KR showed both characteristics of the JP and CN groups..

The aforementioned tendencies of the groups were clearly shown at the end of their compositions where they were obviously expressing their points of view.

The information obtained for this report can be utilized, concretely, in composition instruction for international students in academic Japanese Language programs.