RHEMATIC ADVERBS IN THE ARGUMENTATION STRUCTURE IN JAPANESE

This paper envisages, based on the corpus data, a group of adverbs marking transition to a new thesis in the course of a monological utterance in Japanese. The entities considered vary in such features as referring to new or old information, origins of the new thesis, its compliance or conflict with the existing attitudes, and strategic aims of the communicant. The novelty of the analysis lies in using an integrated descriptive method, as well as in establishing links between the internal semantics of the adverbs and the pragmatics of their usage.