Figura . Figura esquemática mostrando el progreso hipotético

Two types of predicates in Japanese are the verbal, which takes the regular verb as the main predicate, and the nominal, which uses the copulative “be” (da/desu and variants) as the main predicate. The two sentences below represent these two types.

[15]Kinoo tashikani katta. yesterday certainly bought Yesterday (I) certainly bought (it). [16] Kinoo tashikani katta no da.

yesterday certainly bought NOM T certain BE It is that yesterday (I) certainly bought (it).

In the first example the verb katta ‘bought’ is the predicate associ- ated with “I,” while in the second example the copulative da con- cerns itself with the fact that I bought it yesterday. Although both Japanese and English can express a similar thought either with or without nominal predicates, in Japanese nominal predicates are more useful rhetorically.

Nominal Predicates in Japanese

My examination of Japanese nominal predicates is confined to those that take the nominalizers no, koto, and mono (in no da, koto da, and mono da), although there are other ways to form a nominal predicate in Japanese. For example, in Amerika no eikyoo o uketeiru

kanji desu ne ‘I have (lit., it is) the feeling/impression that it is influ-

enced by America,’ kanji ‘feeling/impression’ nominalizes the pre- ceding clause and is followed by the copula. An array of modal

Japanese Sentence Structure 115

usages of nominal predicates in Japanese, for example, wake da ‘that’s why,’ hazu da ‘it should,’ and tsumori da ‘intend to’ function in a similar manner. (See Kitagawa 1995 for an analysis of wake in Japanese discourse.) Nominal predicates in Japanese, especially n(o)

da, have been studied extensively in Japan and elsewhere. They

have been referred to by a variety of names including “extended predicate” ( Jorden 1963; Noda 1992), “n(o) da” or its formal coun- terpart “n(o) desu” (Kuno 1973; McGloin 1983, 1984), and “no

dearu” (Mikami 1972, Shimozaki 1981).

By choosing the nominal predicate, one chooses a mode of predication qualitatively different from utterances without it. In Maynard (1992) I argued that the sources of this difference lie in the cognitive process of (1) objectifying and stativizing the event through nominalization, (2) personalizing the utterance by the predicate da, and (3) organizing information as is situationally and interpersonally appropriate by using the topic structure n(o) da. It is generally agreed that n(o) da functions, as Tadaharu Tanomura (1990) characterizes it, to provide background information relevant to a statement, especially, as Keizoo Saji (1991) suggests, interpre- tative, explanatory, and persuasive information.

When the nominal predicate is used, the rhetorical effect changes. The nonprocessual, stative nature of the n(o) da expres- sion aligns with the tendency of the nominal clause to be marked by a topic marker. Nominal predicates, coupled with the topic- comment organization, work together in framing a conceptual “region” followed by personal commentary. This strategic combi- nation propels the Japanese language toward a state-oriented, comment-centered mode of communication, a preference for the rhetoric of commentation.

“Rhetoric of commentation” refers to a preference for personal commentary, over propositional information (who-does-what-to- whom). The nominalization-commentation combination “wraps” propositional information by conceiving of it as a “region” and emphasizes the addition of the speaker’s attitude toward that infor- mation. Joy Hendry (1990) uses the term “wrapping” in a broad cultural sense that includes honorific language, and I think the term can be extended to many other aspects of the language as well.

In earlier work I introduced a similar term, “social packaging” (Maynard 1989, 31), referring to “a socially motivated act to con- struct the content of utterance in such a way as to achieve maxi- mum agreeableness to the recipient.” There I was discussing the

“social packaging” achieved by conversational strategies (final parti- cles, fillers, and so on), but the term can also apply to sentence structure. Many grammatical devices and structures of Japanese enhance the rhetoric of commentation, among them nominal pred- icates, adverbs of emotional attitude, and topic-comment structure.

Contrasting Verbal and Nominal Predicates in Japanese and English

A contrastive analysis of Japanese and English novelistic discourse demonstrates the importance of nominal predicates (cf. Maynard 1995, 1996a). I have chosen two modern novels, one Japanese and the other American: Kooboo Abe’s Tanin no Kao and Saul Bellow’s

Dangling Man, along with E. Dale Saunders’ English translation The Face of Another and Minoru Oota’s Japanese translation Chuuburarin no Otoko. It is essential to incorporate translations in

both directions, because if only a Japanese original and its English translation are examined, we fail to observe how English (when not used for translation purposes) uses nominalization. For statistical purposes, I have examined the first two hundred sentences in the original Japanese and English novels and their translations.

English expressions that are considered comparable to Japanese nominal predicates include clauses marked by “that,” “if,” infini- tives, and gerunds. The use of these forms in nominal predicates is rather limited in English. And although we can find sentences with forms of “be” followed by “that” or “if,” they often appear in trans- lations corresponding to limited cases of Japanese nominal predi- cates, if at all. In our data there are no cases where the no nominal predicate, the most prevalent kind in Japanese, is translated into a “be” plus “that” or “if” construction in English. The most striking discrepancy between nominal predicates in Japanese and English novelistic discourse is how the no da predicate is handled in English. In the following examples, although no da occurs in Japanese, no nominalizing expression appears in the English translation.

(17) . . . kono ame ga agareba moo sugu natsu

this rain S let up-COND already soon summer na no daroo. (Abe 1968, 6)

BE NOM BE

(18)Soon, when the rains let up, it would be summer. (Saunders 1966, 4)

Japanese Sentence Structure 117

(19) Nanibun, mondai no choosho wa gorannotoori ooban no

anyway question LK statement T as you see large LK

nooto sansatsu ni gisshiri kakikomareta

notebook three in completely filled was written

ichinenkan ni wataru kiroku na no dearu. (Abe 1968, 61)

one year to extend record BE NOM BE

(20) For as you can see, the statement is a record stretching over a whole year and filling three notebooks the size of folios. (Saun- ders 1966, 4)

A similar phenomenon is observed in translation of English into Japanese. In the English original, there are no nominal predicates, but in its corresponding Japanese translation, nominal predicates appear:

(21) Books do not hold me. (Bellow 1944, 10)

(22) Shomotsu ga boku o toraete-kurenai no da. (Oota 1971, 6)

books S I O hold-NEG NOM BE

The difference in rhetorical effect between Japanese and English is sharply contrasted in these examples. In (21) the main predicate takes the verb “hold,” and we find no nominal predicate wrapping the event and transforming it into a state-oriented, com- menting mode of expression. In the translation, however, the event is presented as being state-oriented, and the da-predicate conveys a personal judgment of the nominal clause.

Given this significant difference in rhetorical effects, the use of nominalization (or its absence) will influence the overall effect of the discourse. The conceptual “regions” associated with nominal- ization seem to be universal, but the preference for or against use of nominalization differs among languages. In my data, only a few cases of nominalization occur in English, and cases of nominal predicates are even rarer. Statistics for the initial two hundred sen- tences of Tanin no Kao and Dangling Man and their translations appear in table 4.

The nominal predicates (n[o] da, koto da, and mono da) occur with much greater frequency both in the Japanese original and in the translation into Japanese. N(o) da is by far the most common (51 of 61 nominal predicates in Tanin no Kao and 20 of 24 in

Chuuburarin no Otoko). This is not an isolated phenomenon. For

example, in Japanese casual conversation, I found that 25.48 per-

cent of all sentence-final positions (317 of 1,244) were marked by

n(o) da (Maynard 1992). Likewise, in Maynard 1993b I reported

that in ten taidan (published interview) dialogues, 25.82 percent (520 of 2,014) sentence-final positions were marked by n(o) da nominal predicates. Of course it is possible to express one’s thoughts and feelings in Japanese by using expressions other than nominal predicates or the topic-comment organization. Still, the Japanese preference toward a focus on the whole event is more readily described in the state-oriented nominal structure.

The nominal predicate does not occur with such frequency across all types of discourse. In straight news reports, nominal predicates occur less frequently (Maynard 1997a). This phenome- non is evident in Japanese television news programs. When anchors comment on news items—to the audience as well as among them- selves—nominal predicates occur much more often than when they report straight news (Maynard 1997b). This is because the straight news report centers on what happened—who did what to whom, what resulted, and so on. The kind of novels I have examined, how- ever, fall into a genre whose text is often self-reflective, commenta- tive, and rich in personal thoughts and reflections. But even when this language-internal variability is taken into consideration, where the speaker’s or writer’s personal view is expressed in Japanese dis- course, nominal predicates are significantly frequent.