A Study on the Pragmatic Specificity of Japanese Plural Markers: Focusing on Contrastive Analysis With Korean and Turkish

This study investigates the pragmatic functions of the Japanese plural marker -tachi by comparing it with the Korean plural marker -deul and the Turkish markers -lar/-ler. Utilizing a parallel corpus of 512 tokens from Korean drama subtitles across three genres—survival thriller, human drama, and revenge tragedy—the research examines cross-linguistic patterns in plural realization. The findings reveal that Turkish exhibits nearly obligatory morphological marking (96.1%), while Korean exhibits an animacy-based hierarchy and a distinct “plurality shift” mechanism. In contrast, the Japanese frequently employ zero-marking (28.3%) as a deliberate pragmatic strategy. Cross-genre analysis shows that plural marking in Japanese functions less as a grammatical requirement and more as a subjective tool for psychological grouping and emphasis, especially in situations involving interpersonal conflict or emotional solidarity. By combining reverse-tracing verification with comparisons across genres, this study provides empirical evidence of the unique cognitive structures underlying pluralization in three languages: an individual-based system in Turkish, a context-dependent system in Japanese, and a flexible intermediate system in Korean. These findings highlight the pragmatic adaptability of Japanese pluralization and have practical implications for translation studies and contrastive linguistics.