Japanese Quotative Particles 'to' and 'tte' in Daily Conversation

Abstract

Japanese quotative particles, to and tte, serve multiple syntactic and pragmatic functions and frequently appear in various conversational contexts. The fundamental structure for forming quotations in Japanese follows the pattern [quoted content + quotative particle + thinking verb]. However, in natural discourse, both the quoted content and the verb can be omitted, leading to instances where these particles appear at the beginning or the end of an utterance. Additionally, the elements following these quotative particles are not always thinking verbs but may include other types of verbs, descriptive expressions, interrogatives, or sentence-final particles, further broadening their syntactic versatility. This study adopts a qualitative descriptive approach to analyze the syntactic usage of the quotative particles to and tte in spoken Japanese. A total of 175 conversational samples were extracted from the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (CEJC), yielding 392 instances of quotative particle usage, with 185 occurrences of to and 207 occurrences of tte. The data were systematically categorized into three positional classifications within an utterance: (1) sentence-initial position, (2) mid-sentence position, and (3) sentence-final position. Furthermore, the analysis revealed eight distinct grammatical variations in the use of to and tte in everyday spoken discourse. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the syntactic behavior of Japanese quotative particles and highlight their flexible roles in natural conversation. This study provides insights that may be useful for Japanese linguistics research, particularly in the areas of syntax, pragmatics, and spoken discourse analysis.