Modality and the Japanese Language (review)

Although there is comparatively little writing on Japanese modality in the general linguistics literature, the topic has been extremely popular within Japan, particularly in the past fifteen years. The approach to modality in these ‘domestic’ studies, however, offers little diversity. The dominant concept of modality in Japan is an amalgam of, on the one hand, the notion of modality as the psychological attitude of the speaker (an idea going back to Otto Jespersen and John Lyons), and, on the other, the nineteenth-century notion of modality as the relationship between subject and predicate. The latter was distilled in Japan into the concept of chinjutsuron (predication theory) by the likes of Yoshio Yamada and Motoki Tokieda. This new study in English by Yuki Johnson, a scholar based in the US, aims to give a fresh view on the topic.

Framed by an introductory chapter (Ch. 1) and a conclusion (Ch. 6), Chs. 2 and 3 offer J’s new framework for the study of Japanese modality, while the other two chapters deal with Japanese aspect (Ch. 4) and conditionals (Ch. 5), respectively, and are only loosely related to the main topic of the book. In Ch. 2, J outlines the recent history of the study of modality in the West and in Japan. She then proposes a new approach to Japanese modality which is, simply put, the application of the mainstream approach to English modality to Japanese. This mainstream approach is characterized by the notions of deontic vs. epistemic modality and possibility vs. necessity. As it turns out, however, J hasn’t discarded the notion of the speaker’s psychological attitude (117). Ch. 3 opens with a questionable twist as J opts to recognize as modal only those markers that follow the tense morpheme of the verb. At this point some in-depth argumentation would have been appropriate since this is a decision with potentially far-reaching consequences. The claim that tense is ‘commonly accepted’ as the divider between modal and nonmodal (34, cf. also 27–28) in Japanese linguistics is debatable to say the least (Takashi Masuoka, for instance, draws the dividing line at nominalization).

The modal markers that have been identified with respect to the above-named semantic and syntactic properties are then scrutinized with the help of several tests and sentence frames in order to determine the characteristics of each marker. One of the major conclusions of the chapter is presented in a figure which compares the ‘degree of modality’ of the epistemic markers (105). The results shown in the figure will come as a surprise to many who are familiar with the Japanese studies on modality and bear witness to the uniqueness of J’s approach.

Ch. 4 discusses the relationship between aspect (mainly the Japanese progressive/resultative marker -te iru) and volitional control on one hand, and aspect and negation on the other. J shows that stativity is related to lack of volitional control by the speaker, and negation, contrary to previous assumptions, does not necessarily result in stativity. In Ch. 5, J teases apart the functions of three common conditional markers in Japanese, -(r)eba, -tara, and -to.

With respect to its descriptive coverage, this volume is perhaps surpassed by numerous Japanese publications. The real value of this book, however, lies in the fact that it offers an alternative to the dominant mainstream approach to modality in Japan and ironically does so by applying an approach that is mainstream elsewhere. Readers familiar with the discussion in Japan will be delighted by the many original ideas and insights. Thus, this book is a very welcome contribution to the field.