earticle

영어

In this study, the usage of ‘incomplete utterance’ in conversations betweenJapanese university students were investigated, focusing expression forms andutterance functions. It was firstly found that the use ratio of ‘incomplete utterance’ betweenfirst-meeting persons were higher than that between friends. Conjunctive particles,an expression form of incomplete utterance, were used most both betweenfirst-meeting persons and between friends. Since ‘incomplete utterance’ was usedmost as statement both between first-meeting persons and between friends, overalltendency was similar, while detailed usage was different depending on the degreeof intimacy. The relation between expression forms and utterance functions was alsoinvestigated. For both between first-meeting persons and between friends, the useratios of ‘conjunctive　particles’, ‘case particles’ and ‘others’ as 'hatarakikake' werehigher than those as 'response', but the use ratios of 'noun' and 'adverb' as'response' were higher than those as 'hatarakikake'. That is, overall tendency turnedout similar, although detailed usage was different depending on the degree ofintimacy. From these results, this study showed that the usage of 'incomplete utterance'in Japanese was significantly influenced by the degree of intimacy, and suggestedthat 'incomplete utterance' played an important role for smooth communication.