departmental bulletin paper

Departmental Bulletin Paper

Text

外国語教育のフロンティア. 2022, 5, p. 85-103

Japanese

Text

2022-03-31

論文

In the conventional Arabic education (in the West and in Japan), the sentence-initial particleʾinna has been introduced as a semantic equivalent of the English adverb ‘truly’, ‘indeed’, etc.or the corresponding adverbs in Japanese, makotoni, zituni, geni, etc., which ‘are, however, not necessarily translated’(Honda & Ishiguro 1997). This type of explanation based on the ‘Grammar-Translation Method’ will not enhance the students’ comprehension of this frequently occurring grammatical item. This study sheds light on the structural and functional parallelisms of ʾinna and Japanese noda (e.g., Tanomura 1990; Noda 1997), which has been studied in contrast with parallel constructions in many languages, e.g., Korean kesita, Chinese shi de, Mongolian yum/mön, Spanish es que, French c’est que, English it is that, etc. This study argues ʾinna as a marker of (contrastive) sentence-cum-argument focus, but not a topicalizer as many other studies/textbooks have claimed, and reassesses the traditional label for the modal value of ʾinna given by the medieval grammarians, tawkīd ‘assertion, confirmation’(traditionally translated ‘emphasis’). By examining parallel translations (mainly Le petit prince and the New Testament, i.e., texts translated from the third language to both Arabic and Japanese), this study identifies four functions shared by noda and ʾinna (‘explanation’, ‘prehension’,‘disclosure’ and ‘demonstration’), one only attested with noda (‘hortation’) and one only attested with ʾinna (‘spontaneous (re)action/direct indication’). In addition, some remarks are made on the rather contrastive distribution of noda vs. ʾinna within the discourse and registers, as well as the cross-linguistic nature of the formal, functional and etymological continuity of the focus and presentative constructions.

10.18910/87569

87569

日本語「のだ」とアラビア語 ʾinna

仲尾, 周一郎

大阪大学大学院言語文化研究科

Japanese

2022-03-31

外国語教育のフロンティア

5

85

103

https://hdl.handle.net/11094/87569

10.18910/87569

https://doi.org/10.18910/87569