The development of confirmation/agreement markers away from the RP in Japanese

In present-day colloquial Japanese, daro(o)/desho(o), the conjectural forms of the copulas that are agglutinated to at the right periphery (RP) of the clause, are detached from the clause and are used as the stand-alone confirmation/agreement markers. This paper explores the developmental pathway from the RP daro(o)/desho(o) to the stand-alone discourse-pragmatic items, addressing how they serve “exchange structure” and “action structure”-related functions in Schiffrin’s (1987) model of discourse coherence. Evidence from corpus studies of these items in the early 1900s and in present-day Japanese suggest that the stand-alone uses developed from their uses at the RP through the anaphor. This paper provides further evidence for Onodera’s (2014, and elsewhere) suggestion that discourse-pragmatic items tend to be recruited from the RP items in the history of Japanese.