Interactional particles: ne, yo, yone Italian Japanese learners from a communicative perspective

Abstract

Japanese sentence-final particles ne, yo and yone have a rich variety of modality functions, associated with important features in everyday speech. Even though Japanese children can use them efficiently, it is troublesome for Japanese language learners to acquire these interactional items and utilize them accurately in conversation. However, if these are used improperly, the speaker will result unnatural and miscomprehensions could arise. Many are the studies related to the interactional particles in question, yet they have not been fully examined from the viewpoint of Japanese language education. Focus of this study are Italian learners of Japanese, and their usage of ne, yo and yone. The corpus consists of five videos of natural occurring conversation in Japanese, each of them between an Italian Japanese learner and a native speaker. Through the tools given by Conversation Analysis, extracts in which the particles appear are transcribed and examined to understand what the uses by the non-native speakers are. In the first chapter, we are going to review the concept of modality and all its facets especially regarding the Japanese language, focusing on the particles' functions analyzed by previous studies in different perspectives. In the second chapter, a focus on how ne, yo and yone are treated in Japanese teaching materials is presented. Later, a review of the studies focusing on Japanese language learners and their uses of the particles is given. In the third and last chapter, the collected corpus is analyzed and considerations on the found results are stated.