A widely recognised characteristic of spoken Japanese is its frequent use of final-particles, and among them yo is one of the most commonly used items. This study investigates the differences and similarities between Japanese and Korean, with particular reference to the ‘assertiveness’ conveyed by the Japanese particle yo and its Korean equivalents. As is generally recognised, Japanese and Korean share similarities in grammar. However, with respect to the use of yo, which does not contribute to the propositional content of the utterance, there is no absolute one-to-one equivalent in Korean. The assertive function served by yo is realised in Korean by various suffixes. More specifically, with regard to the assertive function of yo, as a result of the speaker’s assessment of the addressee’s knowledge, this study will show that yo is used in a wider range of contexts than the corresponding Korean equivalents such as -e, -maliya, -ko, and -nikka. The analysis focuses on these Korean suffixes as markers that function in a pragmatically similar way to the way yo does in Japanese. I will argue that what determines the use of the different suffixes in Korean, in the same context where yo is used in Japanese, is the degree of assertiveness conveyed within the organisation of dispute in discourse. The data used in this study comprises 522 Japanese expressions containing yo. They were collected from dialogues in the first 100 pages of four modern Japanese novels. The Korean is taken from the translations of those novels.

研究論文