Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This study investigates the ‘to omou’ construction in Japanese, [a complement clause + a quotation marker + omou ‘think’], with the aim of identifying recurrent forms associated with the construction and analyzing their functions in natural conversation. The data come from the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation. Our quantitative analyses identify various distributional patterns surrounding the construction, including the ending forms of the complement clause, combinations of quotation markers and conjugated forms of omou, and the construction’s position within an utterance. We also conducted qualitative analyses of the discourse functions of toka omotte and found that it serves multiple functions, such as explaining the reason for an action or quoting one’s thought in a complaint. From a constructional perspective, our findings suggest that various recurrent patterns should be taken into consideration to adequately capture the multiple functions of the complement-taking predicate omou in Japanese conversation.