THE JAPANESE COPULA: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS. Tomiko Narahara.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. x + 210. $55.00 cloth.
This book examines the Japanese copula, da and
datta, which occurs with predicative nominals and adjectival
nominals. Narahara's primary contribution is to challenge the
common assumption that the Japanese copula is a tense feature carrier
(p. 12). She points out in chapter 4 that copula-less sentences such as
Kwoo-wa nitiyoobi “Today is Sunday” and
Kita-wa kotti? “Is north in this direction?” can
still be interpreted with the present time reference. She proposes
that, although the morpheme ta in datta encodes the
past reference, the copula form da does not encode the present
tense. In chapter 10, she shows that the copula form da is
systematically excluded when the speaker lacks knowledge of the truth
of the sentence. For example, the copula form never appears in
yes/no questions such as Kwoo-wa doyoobi
*da/Ø? “Is today Saturday?” and
sentences with epistemic modals such as Yuuta-wa genki
*da/Ø rasii “Yuta seems to be
well,” whereas it is perfectly acceptable for the copula form
da to occur in normal declarative sentences such as
Kwoo-wa doyoobi da “Today is Saturday.” She
suggests that the copula da is a modal expressing what she
calls the anti-ignorative affirmative mode, and it is the
anti-ignorative mode that makes the copula incompatible with yes/no
questions and sentences with epistemic modals. Finally, in chapter 11,
she discusses cases where the copula form da in normal
declarative sentences alternates with the zero-copula. She concludes
that the zero-copula is a device to tone down utterances and is used
when the speaker attempts to make the expression less assertive and
authoritative. This explains why women or children tend to use the
zero-copula even in normal declarative sentences.