ABSTRACT
Many utterances in Japanese discourse consist only of a subordinate clause and a conjunctive particle such as kedo ‘but’, ba ‘if’, or te ‘and’, without a following main clause. This chapter considers why such seemingly incomplete expressions are widely used, focusing on the understudied particle te as a case in point. An examination of a corpus of conversations finds that utterances ending with te (TeUs) tend to occur with certain formal and functional properties, and that TeUs are not incomplete and hence disfluent but well-formed functional utterances; by using TeUs, a speaker can achieve a variety of discourse-structural and sociopragmatic functions that cannot be attained by overtly expressing a ‘main’ clause. In addition, many TeUs constitute grammatical constructions although they are not all equally well established as such; rather, TeU types fall on a continuum of conventionality. The study illustrates the dynamic, complex, and flexible relationship between form and meaning.
