The Japanese connective tara 'if/when' has been extensively studied in comparative perspectives with three other conditionals, namely, ba, to, and nara.  However, its historical development and emotive/subjective meanings in discourse have been neglected.

The modern Japanese connective tara is the irrealis form of the Old Japanese perfective auxiliary tari that is used before the particle ba in order to form a conditional phrase.  We identify the following two grammaticalization processes for the modern Japanese tara:

 A:  tara 'irrealis' + ba (conditional particle)  >  tara ba  >  tara

 B:  to (quote. particle) + iw 'say' + tara + ba (cond. prtcl.)  >  to ittara  >  (t)tara

An earlier stage of Process A, tara became independent of ba as a hypotactic conditional connective as in (1), and at a later stage, the protasis was further grammaticalized as the nucleus (vis-a-vis margin) as in (2).

(1)  Bangohan?  Otoo-san kaettara,    tabemashoo.   (conditional)
       dinner?        Dad         return home-TARA eat-let's
       "Dinner?  Let's have it when Dad returns home,"

(2)  Bangohan?  Otoo-san kaettara      ne.     (negotiation)
       dinner?        Dad         return home-TARA sentence particle
       "Dinner?  [When] Dad returns home, OK?"

Process B developed the following discourse interactional usage:

(3)  Nee,   okaasan tara.       (an attention-getter)
       Hey   Mom-TARA
       "Hey, Mom, [are you listening?]"

(4)  Moo  sukoshi benkyoo shinasai ttara.    (emphatic tone added to request)
       more bit          study     do-imperative-TARA
       "Study a bit more, [didn't I tell you that?]"

(5)  Hanako-ttara, sugoi  wa          ne.   (topic:  negative reactive)
       Hanako-TOP great   female-sentence particle sentence particle
       "Hanako!  Isn't she great? (ironically)"

This paper argues that these discourse interactional meanings stem from the original aspectual meaning of “perfective”.  The perfective depicts the situation in its completion, from which evolves the meaning of irreversibility of the completed event, which is often contrary to the speaker's expectation.  Thus, the negative connotation of 'Aren't you listening?' in (3) and 'Didn't I say so?' in (4) evolve.  This negative connotation is also integrated into the topic-setting tara use in (5).

This paper claims that the development of such emotive/subjective meanings can be understood naturally in the context of Traugott's framework of subjectification in grammaticalization.  The term 'subjectification' is defined as "a pragmatic-semantic process whereby meanings become increasingly based in the speaker's subjective belief state/attitude toward the proposition."

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