Pragmatic functions of the Japanese sentence-final construction no(da): an analysis of online forum postings.

This paper investigates the usage of the Japanese sentence-final construction no(da) in 27 postings collected from online question-and-answer forums. This linguistic feature appears frequently in both spoken and written Japanese discourse; however, it continues to pose difficulties to researchers when attempting to identify its meaning and functions. A major issue is that insufficient information regarding discourse context has resulted in ambiguity in many of the functions described in previous studies. Considering these limitations, the present study attempted to specify discourse contexts towards which three proposed functions of no(da) gravitate: 1) giving and asking explanation, 2) evoking politeness, and 3) organizing discourse. The results of this study indicate that two collocations, ~no desu ga and ~no deshou ka, play important roles in serving these functions in the genre of question-and-answer forums.