ON THE JAPANESE SENTENCE-FINAL PARTICLE NE : REVISITED

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the semantics of the Japanese sentence-final particle NE. NE appears frequently in spoken Japanese and it can roughly be translated into English tag questions such as 'isn't it ?', 'didn't you?' etc. However, this English tag meaning does not cover all the uses of NE and I will show that NE, like other Japanese sentence-final particles, interacts with contextual information more sensitively than concept words such as 'hot', 'rain' do.