Functional peculiarities of anaphoric units in the Japanese language system

Irkutsk State University, Department of Oriental and Asia-Pacific Studies, 664000, Irkutsk, Russia

^* Corresponding author: i_v_s2000@mail.ru

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of the anaphoric usage of some Japanese units (copulas, nominalizers, demonstrative pronouns) at the semantic and syntactic levels. The study of anaphoric relations in the language in general and in individual languages in particular is of great interest to linguists conducting research in various areas of modern linguistics. Anaphora has been studied by functional linguists, cognitive linguists, psycholinguists, etc. Anaphoric relations have been described not only in the sentence, but also in the text. Now information about the use of anaphoric means at the level of discourse is considered to be one of the mandatory elements of a comprehensive description of the language or its pronominal system. Pronouns are given special attention, since they function as substitute words and help to make our speech more concise. Anaphoric demonstrative pronouns are used as connecting elements in the text and form intertextual links. They show that there is a predicate that identifies the previous and subsequent fragments of the utterance. Our approach can be characterized as an integral one. We attempt to present a complex description of the usage of anaphoric units in the Japanese language specifying their morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and communicative properties.