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Abstract
This thesis provides an account of the options for dialogistic positioning in Japanese. By “dialogistic positioning” is understood the ways in which speakers/writers may present as engaging with prior speakers on the current topic or as anticipating likely reactions or responses from addressees. In providing this account, the thesis draws inspiration from prior work in the appraisal framework literature - most particularly work by White (1998, 2003) and Martin and White (2005) - on dialogistic positioning in English. This system is termed “Engagement” and is informed by Bakhtinian notions of dialogism and heteroglossia. Martin and White’s account has been influential over more than a decade, being taken up by discourse analysists working across multiple fields. However, as emphasised by Martin and White, their account is offered as a description of the options for dialogistic positioning available in English, with no assumption that the same set of options will necessarily operate in other languages. They have suggested that any accounts of the options for dialogistic positioning in other languages need to deal with the interpersonal semantics of those languages in their own terms and should not simply transfer the categories observed to operate in English across to other languages. At the time this project was conceived, there was no such account of the options for dialogistic positioning in Japanese – i.e. one which developed a taxonomy by considering the semantics of Japanese in its own terms. It was felt timely to attempt such an account, and the work reported here was the result. It was assumed that this would be of interest and benefit to grammarians and discourse analysts working with, or interested in Japanese, given how widely influential Martin and White’s account of dialogistic positioning has been for scholars working on English. As well as presenting and arguing for a particular taxonomy of options for dialogistic positioning in Japanese, the thesis exemplifies the application of this account in Japanese discourse analyses interested in how such meanings are used in texts and how different patterns of use of these meanings may correlate with differences in social identity and textual persona.