The aims of this volume are to assist teachers and learners of Japanese as a foreign language in their teaching or acquisition of Japanese sentence-final particles. The first chapter is a hands-on introduction and is followed by two chapters that present literature reviews that, respectively, introduce the particle function hypothesis (PFH) and justify the qualitative methodology adopted. To validate the PFH, the next three chapters describe the functions of particles in talk-in-interaction in which both native and nonnative speakers of Japanese participate. The final chapter concludes that a good linguistic grasp of particles is needed to prepare teachers for the pedagogical materials of the Japanese language classroom.

The starting point of this study is the author’s critique of major teaching Japanese as a foreign language textbooks, whose descriptions are deemed to be linguistically and pedagogically insufficient. Three sentence-final particles, ne, yo, and yone, are chosen as the focus for two reasons: First, they frequently occur in talk-in-interaction, and second, the first two are major grammatical items in textbooks. The study also takes into account zero particles or nonoccurrence of particles. The PFH, composed of pragmatic and sequential principles, stipulates that figure-ground gestalt accounts for the use of particles in talk-in-interaction; the figure (what is uttered) emerges in the first turn, becoming the ground (conversational background) for a new, often predictable proposition to be activated in the next turn. The three particles differ from one another based on how the grounding of a figure takes place in turn taking. In this regard, zero is quite different, as it does not ground the figure; that is, it does not facilitate topic development.

This study certainly contributes to the crosslinguistic analysis of talk-in-interaction, but it does contain some problems. For example, example (96c) is ungrammatical. Also, a strict distinction between ne and zero may not exist; the use of zero in a radio interaction (p. 107) appears to result in the hearer’s acceptance in a manner equal to that of ne. Both of these problems weaken the validity of the PFH. The descriptions of the particles (p. 217) are a remarkable achievement. One is eager to know, however, exactly how this discourse-based, unified approach can be put into practice in actual classroom teaching.