This article provides a reexamination of recent work on the use of garu and teiru which concluded that although garu and teiru are associated with the desires and thoughts of a third person, the terms are seldom used alone; rather, they usually accompany a modal auxiliary, such as mitai and rashii or verbs of hearsay, such as ~da-tte and ~tte-itte-iru.
Although the theoretical justification for the work (using Kuno's empathy theory and Kamio's theory of territory of information) on such conclusion is convincing and adequate, the data employed were exclusively obtained from authentic conversation, and did not include data from written materials. Since both speaking and writing represent important and relevant mental activities, it is difficult to conclude from oral communication alone regarding the true nature of the language use.
Motivated by such aspects of the research on garu and teiru, this article further investigated the use of these auxiliaries from the viewpoint of written materials (such as novels, articles published on websites, etc.) to scrutinize whether these auxiliaries always accompany modals when a listener is not present in front of the individual.
The data obtained from written sources reveal that modals are not necessarily used in written materials, where a listener is not present. Sentences such as Buchoo wa Tokoroda no sei da to omotte-iru "The section chief is thinking that Mr. Tokoroda is to blame" are often seen in these types of material. This means that garu and te-iru can be used alone when there is no empathy concerned with the information and when the information of a third person's thoughts does not have to be presented as a subjective matter. In writing, due to the lack of the immediate presence of an audience, the writer does not need to employ a device to make the listener understand to whom the information belongs or how deeply emotionally the writing is involved in the third person's state of mind.
The treatment of garu and te-iru thus needs to be expanded to the extent that both auxiliaries are used with other modals in real time communication with a listener, but the use of such modals can disappear when listeners are not present. Further, such observation demonstrates that the degree of existence of empathy between the speaker/writer and listener/audience is key to the use of garu and te-iru; i.e., when the speaker feels strong empathy or no empathy at all (as endpoints on a continuum), these auxiliaries can be used alone and when the speaker needs to identify a relationship between the speaker and the person whose state of mind is conveyed by the speaker. Thus, the auxiliaries garu and te-iru are indicators of the speaker's emotion toward the state of mind of the individual the speaker tries to describe.