Occurrence Conditions of Ru-form in Causal Construction for Blaming and its Mechanisms of the Nuance Generation

Abstract

The present study conducted a linguistic survey to 48 Japanese native speakers in order to clarify the occurrence conditions of a tense form RU with kara-clause verb in so-called Causal Construction of Blaming (hereafter CCB, RU kara, ~noda) and the generative mechanism of its negative nuance. First, the result of the subjects’ grammatical judgement to the causal sentences with three variable factors, 1) clarity of the object blamed, 2) generality of causal relation, and 3) volitionality of kara-clause verb showed that they are important in this order to be judged grammatical. Next, the native speakers’ intensity judgement of the negative nuance depending on tense and subject demonstrated that RU-RU was the strongest, RU-TA the second, and TA-TA the weakest when kara-clause and main clause share the same subject, whereas RU-TA and TA-TA were equally strong unless sharing the same subject. The last main clause completion test result indicated that negative contents tend to be written in main clause more frequently with RU in kara-clause than with TA. Based on these results, this study concludes that the negative nuance of CCB can be created by the emphasis of cause, equivalent to responsibility, kara-clause information being1) focalized and/or 2) foregrounded by sentence-final noda and/or selection of RU form respectively as well as Tamura’s (2013) pragmatic conditions and semantics.