In this innovative study, Professor Narahara offers a multi-disciplinary description of the Japanese copula, revealing it to be at the interface of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Most striking is her discovery of the copula's function to express the speaker's knowledge or ignorance about the proposition of the sentence. She provides a new morphological feature analysis to derive this modal function and further proposes a series of unified accounts for a wide range of discourse phenomena.CONTENTS:Acknowledgements - PART ONE: CONCEPT OF COPULA - Introduction to JapaneseCopula - Copula as a Universal Notion - PART TWO: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS: THEVIEW FROM FEATURE MORPHOLOGY - Grammatical Feature Representation - AgainstOvert Present Tense Feature Morphology - Categorial Marking Analysis - PART THREE: EVOLUTION OF INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY - Categorial Forms in aDiachronic Perspective - Forms and Functions of Modern Copula - Da -Discourse Functions of Da and Zyanai - IndexTOMIKO NARAHARA is Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Linguistics and Director of the Japanese Language Programme at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara.