Other Problems

17.1. C ontracting style . This study has been based entirely on one style of standard colloquial Japanese. There is also another style existing alongside the basic one; this is the contracting style . It is not difficult to keep the two separate for practical purposes, since any utterance in the contracting style is paralleled by an utterance in the non-contracting style. From the theoretical point of view, however, contracting and non-contracting styles cannot be so neatly separated in advance of the analysis, since both occur in the speech of the same people under essentially similar circumstances. It is perhaps possible to justify theoretically the separation of the two styles early in the analysis by the following criterion. If A and B are any two forms of the contracting style, and A ′ and B ′ are the respective corresponding forms of the non-contracting style, the difference in meaning between A and A ′ is the same as the difference in meaning between B and B ′. (Such a criterion may also be of use in identifying elements from different languages or dialects used by the same speaker.)