In this paper, I will discuss the Japanese particle toka. Underhill (1988) claims that the discourse marker like in English gfunctions with great reliability as a marker of new information and focus." I will claim that toka in Japanese functions in a way very similar to English discourse marker like. My analysis is based on the speech data I collected.
According to the Japanese encyclopedia Daijisen (1995), the particle toka, has
two different usages. One is to list more than two items, usually NPs. When
used in this way, toka follows after every item listed. For example:
1. yuki toka ame toka arashi toka ga kuru.
: Things such as snow, rain, and storm comes.
The second use is as an evidential or hearsay marker as in:
2. kare wa amerika ni itta toka kii ta.
: I heard such he went to America or something.
In the data I collected, there are instances of toka that seem to play a
different role from the way that Daijisen explains. For example:
3. A: watashi wa E:::/ toka ttec=
: I felt like" what!"
In this instance, toka introduces the emphatic utterance E:::/, which is the focus of Afs sentence. Note that the grammaticality or the core meaning of the sentence is not affected by the presence or absence of toka. This also shows that toka clearly has the characteristics of a discourse marker.
I will show the similarities between Japanese toka and English like based on my original speech data. The usages of toka in current Japanese casual speech do not affect the syntactic or semantic structures of the utterance, but gives a pragmatic effect to the discourse as a focus marker.