Ellipsis and Discourse-Syntactic Structures in Japanese Interview Discourse: The Emergence of the Evidential Marker to *

This study addresses the elision of complement-taking predicates (CTPs) in Japanese interview discourse, and explores the discourse-syntactic contexts which facilitate the elision. A frequency-based approach is chosen to scrutinize the ellipsis and related issues concerning CTP. In Japanese, grammatical subjects are often unexpressed, and even CTPs are omitted in unplanned discourse; the clause contains only the complementizer to. In interview discourse, the overall frequency of CTP elision is relatively low (32.1%); however, when adverbial clauses precede to-marked clauses, the elision of CTP increases. Of the four types of adverbial clauses found in the database used in this study, i.e. cause/reason, concessive, conditional and temporal clauses, cause/reason and concessive clauses most frequently co-occur with to-marked clauses: the former provide the source of evidence for the following to-marked clauses, while the latter contain a fact or notion in spite of which the truth of the main clause is asserted. These two types of adverbial clauses account for 87.4% of all to-marked clauses, and 89.9% of the following to-marked clauses elide the CTP in this clause-linkage. Furthermore, when the preceding adverbial clause contains an embedded clause with to and an overt verb of thinking or saying, the following to-marked clause shows an even higher rate of CTP elision. In addition to these discourse-syntactic properties, to-marked clauses overwhelmingly mark the speaker’s (i.e. 1 st person’s) reproduction of his/her own utterance or thought in the past (more than 90%), functioning as an evidential and indicating relatively firm sources of information.

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