The NO DA construction in Japanese

Abstract

The NO DA construction is one of the most common expressions in Japanese and at the same time it is one of the most difficult expressions for students of Japanese to master. Many linguists and authors of Japanese textbooks have attempted to describe various manifestations of NO DA . in different contexts and situations. This sub-thesis is an attempt to explain these various manifestations in terms of a set of invariant semantic components. In preparation for the semantic analysis of NO DA, the syntactic properties of this construction are first examined, to show where NO DA is located in the clause and how it differs syntactically from the rest of the so-called 'evidentials'. Next, NO DA is compared with expressions such as KARA DA and WAKE DA, with which it has something in common, both syntactically and semantically. On the basis of this discussion, two invariant semantic components are proposed as being common to all the manifestations of NO DA. The differences between these various manifestations are attributed to the linguistic or extra-linguistic context of the utterance. In an effort to verify this analysis various examples of the use of NO DA are examined, firstly in its affirmative form, then in complex sentences involving NO DA KARA (in a reason clause) and NO DA GA (in a prefatory remark) and finally in the conjectural, interrogative and negative forms. The primary function of the NO DA construction was found to be one of cohesion. NO DA provides cohesion not only between the proposition embraced by it and the context or situation it refers to, but also between the speaker and the addressee. A particularly important factor is that, in using NO DA, the speaker indicates that he assumes that what he is referring to is in the consciousness of the addressee.