@article{oai:kanazawa-u.repo.nii.ac.jp:00047571, author = {西嶋, 義憲 and Nishijima, Yoshinori}, journal = {言語文化論叢, Studies of Language and Culture}, month = {Mar}, note = {Second person assertives with verbs of thinking as predicates, such as You think that my paper will be accepted in an international journal. are hardly ever uttered to a conversation participant in everyday communication, apart from second person interrogatives like Do you think that my paper will be accepted in an international journal?, apparently because it is odd for the speaker to tell the interlocutor categorically what he or she thinks. However, such sentences can occasionally be observed in fictional conversations in Franz Kafka's works. The following is one example: "You think you have strength enough to come over here and that you're only hanging back of your own accord." (Franz Kafka: The Judgment) In such an utterance the speaker (the father) expresses verbally what he claims to see through or in the mind of his interlocutor (his son) in order to gain an advantage in their interpersonal relationship. Such an utterance can be called a "seeing-through utterance" (Nishijima 2005; 2015). Seeing-through utterances seem to be used in Kafka's works as interpersonal games in conversations between characters. Thus, it can be hypothesized that seeing-through utterances are used as wordplay in interpersonal games in order for the speakers to display certain of their attitudes to their interlocutors. The aim of the present paper is twofold: (a) to analyze some seeing-through utterances in several works of Franz Kafka, (b) to demonstrate that they are used as wordplay, i.e., a psychological trick to display the power of the speaker over the interlocutor. The analysis of seeing-through utterances can be expected to shed light on an unknown aspect of wordplay in the fictional conversations of Franz Kafka.}, pages = {109--128}, title = {“Seeing-Through Utterance” as Wordplay: Interpersonal Games in Fictional Conversations of Franz Kafka}, volume = {23}, year = {2019} }