Michiko Takeuchi
Kanagawa University
Successful communication includes certain propositional attitude of the speaker. In addition to the proposition it expresses or implicates, an utterance may suggest to the hearer certain attitude of claim, belief, comment, doubt, regret, emphasis or pretense, etc. This paper discusses Japanese pragmatic markers, mattaku and zenzen, which both mean ‘(not) at all’ in English. For example:
(Reply for the telephone call inquiring degree of snowfall at the ski resort)
a. kotoshi wa mattaku, yuki ga franai.
b. kotoshi wa zenzen, yuki ga furanai.
c. This year we have no snow at all.
Both utterances of mattaku and zenzen as well as the corresponding English equivalence of ‘(not) at all’ express some emphasis on Neg element for the state of affairs: ‘no’ snowfall this year. However, the examples show different degrees of explicitness between Japanese and English.
The speaker of mattaku makes a purely descriptive claim: the emphasis is on the negative proposition itself, ‘not snowing.’ The speaker of zenzen, on the other hand, communicates that the snowfall this year is far less than average. In interpreting the utterance with zenzen, the hearer must construct a higher-order representation of the type such as ‘the speaker doesn’t think,’ ‘the speaker doesn’t say’, ‘the speaker doesn’t claim,’ and the emphasis is on this inferred higher-order metarepresentation.
The previous literature takes mattaku and zenzen as a variation of the same meaning type. However, this paper argues that they should be taken as distinct meaning types. The distinction is drawn between conceptual representations of the speaker’s attitude and procedural constraints on the process of identifying the intended attitude. Mattaku encodes conceptual information, while zenzen encodes procedural information.
Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that Japanese is rich in pragmatic markers contributing to the explicit side of communication, which add further layers of metarepresentation on the communicated content.