This article deals with so-called sentence-final coordinating conjunctions in some dialectal varieties of English and Japanese. It emphasises that such final coordinating conjunctions derive from two syntactically different processes (“truncation” and “backshift”), and demonstrates that the final conjunctions stemming from each process differ accordingly in syntactic, prosodic, and discourse-pragmatic terms. In both English and Japanese, the backshift type of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions (i) can be fronted to sentence/clause-initial position with no semantic/logical contradiction, (ii) have a sentence-final contour, (iii) do not tolerate being followed by a filler or interjectory particle, and (iv) express emphatic or emotive meanings. On the other hand, the truncation type of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions show the opposite characteristics. The cross-linguistic commonality observed in each of the two types of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions strongly suggests that their discourse-pragmatic meanings are cross-linguistically associated with syntactic/grammatical repertoires, such as truncation, backshift, and sentence-final position.

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Goffman (1978: 800) claims that “[a] response cry doesn’t seem to be a statement in the linguistic sense (even a heavily elided one),” which suggests that such cries do not have the linguistic structures of statements (or descriptions) of either a speaker’s emotion/sensation or evaluation of a situation. This study conducted a questionnaire survey targeting Japanese and American English speakers to investigate expressions they will produce under eight circumstances of Goffman’s response cries. The results were contrary to Goffman’s claim. About half of the Japanese response cries were “descriptive interjections” like Ita(i) ‘Painful’ and Yaba(i) ‘Awful,’ and so were about 17 percent of the American response cries. On the other hand, non-descriptive interjections (swear words, vocatives) were more favoured by American English speakers, but extremely rare in Japanese. This study also addresses the questions of sociality and/or dialogicity of response cries in the two languages.

Across the countries of the world, Japan can rightly claim to be a great “Twitter nation” (Akimoto 2011). Japanese people like to tweet anytime and anywhere. Although the popularity of Twitter in Japan is often associated with the large information capacity of Japanese character sets (Wagner 2013), Neubig and Duh (2013) prove that this is not necessarily the case. Our research compares two sets of data (300 tweets for each) posted by Japanese and Americans, and demonstrates that Japanese tweets contain more monologic features, or show a higher degree of monologicity, than Americans’ tweets. Also, more than 60% of the sentence-ending forms in the Japanese tweets do not encode explicit addressee orientation. The study reveals that it is not the Japanese unique character sets, but the grammatical devices for monologization that linguistically allow Japanese users to enjoy the fullest benefits of online anonymity and addressee underspecification provided by Twitter.

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