The Research on the Procedural Meaning of the Japanese and English Discourse Connectives and the Pragmatic Inference

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I have attempted to investigate, within the relevance-theoretic and corpus-based framework, the procedural meaning of the English discourse connective after all and the Japanese discourse connective datte, and the pragmatic inference involved in the interpretation of the utterances in which they occur. The claim of this research is that the interpretation of the utterances including these two expressions comprises a pragmatic term 'previous assumption' besides 'conclusion' and 'evidence', both of which are traditionally accepted, and that the procedure encoded by after all and datte is to process 'evidence' in order to fill the cognitive gap between 'conclusion' and 'evidence'. This claim implies that the two discourse connectives convey emotion and will as well as logic. When the speaker gives evidence to his or her conclusion by using after all, it gives the addressee no option but to accept the conclusion. Likewise, when the speaker intends to perform different types of speech acts--justification and agreement--by using datte, the speaker's emotion and will are conveyed in the way the addressee's assumption is adjusted to conform to the speaker's conclusion in the case of justification, whereas the speaker's assumption gets closer to the addressee's assumption in the case of agreement. Despite the fact that datte occurs in these different contexts, the speaker using it intends to minimize the cognitive gap between his or her assumption and the addressee's. This aspect of after all and datte is made evident from the fact that they are commonly used in a colloquial conversation.