Emotions, Perceptions and Desires of a Third Person: An Ethnogrammatical Study of the -Garu Structure in Japanese

Abstract

Japanese suffix –garu is combined with mental verbs/adjectives and this structural pattern expresses a third person’s physical or psychological representations from the speaker’s observational viewpoint. In ethnogrammar, it is interesting to discuss cultural constraints on the grammar of a language. The purpose of the present paper is to study the structural pattern of the Japanese suffix -garu from an ethnogrammatical perspective. I will discuss what types of cultural aspects the construction of -garu suffix is relating to, and what the relation is based on.