Sentence Final Particles Ne. Xxxx, and Yo Among the variables, final particles have attracted researchers’ interest more than any other resource, especially the ones most commonly used in ordinary conversation: ne, yone, and yo (e.g., Xxxxx 1990, 1998; Xxxxxx and Xxxxxx 1997, 1998; Xxxxxx 2002, 2005; Xxxxx 2003; Xxxxxx 2000). Many of these researchers agree that the particles mark some aspect of epistemic stance of the speaker. For instance, Xxxxx (1990, 1998) says that the particles are used to mark which speaker’s “territory” a piece of information belongs to. For instance, when a speaker describes the inner state of the hearer, the use of ne, which is argued to mark information that belongs to the hearer’s territory of information, is obligatory. Xxxxxx (2002) adopts Xxxxxxx’x (1981) notion of “authorship”, which roughly corresponds to the notion of “epistemic authority” in Heritage (2002) and in later works (Kanai 2003; Xxxxxx 2005), and argues that yo marks the speaker’s strong authority, ne marks “weak or incomplete authority in relation to the other speaker” (Xxxxxx 2002:226), and yone functions as the combination of yo and ne. These previous studies lead us to reasonably assume that these final particles are used to mark different stances in terms of “socioepistemic authority” (Xxxxxxx 2005:132)—i.e., knowledgeability based on social identity or expertise. However, the final particles are not the only epistemic marker within a turn. Other components such as a copula, nominalization, interjections, and the choice of descriptive words also contribute to the overall stance embodied in the utterance. Thus, although researchers tend to argue about the overall stance of an utterance by examining only these particles, the significance of the turn as a whole is determined by the combination of all the components of it. As an attempt to fill in this gap, this study focuses on another variable for formulating an agreement in Japanese, which consists of different ways of referring to the core of the first assessment or what it is agreeing with—repetition of a descriptive term used in the preceding first assessment as opposed to the use of an anaphor “soo” in referring to it. Hereinafter, an agreement that includes the former will be called a repetitional agreement, and one with the latter will called an anaphorical agreement. Both repetitional and anaphorical agreements can include all of the three final particles (as will be shown in excerpts (1) through (6) in the next section), which ...
