Papers by Natsuko Nakagawa
BRILL eBooks, Oct 19, 2022
We experimentally investigate, by means of a novel gestureelicitation paradigm, the spontaneous s... more We experimentally investigate, by means of a novel gestureelicitation paradigm, the spontaneous spatial frames of reference (FoRs) used by bilingual individuals who speak Japanese (which has been labeled as a “relative” language) and one of the endangered Ryukyuan languages (Miyako or Shiraho) whose speakers have been reported to routinely use absolute FoRs. How would these last elderly bilingual speakers spontaneously resolve the clashing FoRs the two languages they speak bring forth? We find that despite the fact that Japanese and these Ryukyuan languages have full corresponding grammatical and lexical resources for expressing both, relative and absolute FoR, Ryukyuan speakers tend to markedly prefer the latter gesturally. Methodologically, the results, which are consistent with data obtained with standard FoRs methods, corroborate the reliability of the novel gesture elicitation task, which adds to the battery of techniques for studying FoRs a method that assesses effortless spon...
We experimentally investigate, by means of a novel gestureelicitation paradigm, the spontaneous s... more We experimentally investigate, by means of a novel gestureelicitation paradigm, the spontaneous spatial frames of reference (FoRs) used by bilingual individuals who speak Japanese (which has been labeled as a “relative” language) and one of the endangered Ryukyuan languages (Miyako or Shiraho) whose speakers have been reported to routinely use absolute FoRs. How would these last elderly bilingual speakers spontaneously resolve the clashing FoRs the two languages they speak bring forth? We find that despite the fact that Japanese and these Ryukyuan languages have full corresponding grammatical and lexical resources for expressing both, relative and absolute FoR, Ryukyuan speakers tend to markedly prefer the latter gesturally. Methodologically, the results, which are consistent with data obtained with standard FoRs methods, corroborate the reliability of the novel gesture elicitation task, which adds to the battery of techniques for studying FoRs a method that assesses effortless spon...
日本学術振興会特別研究員（PD） 千葉大学国立国語研究所 IR推進室JSPS Research Fellow (PD), Chiba UniversityInstitutional Resear... more 日本学術振興会特別研究員（PD） 千葉大学国立国語研究所 IR推進室JSPS Research Fellow (PD), Chiba UniversityInstitutional Research Office, NINJAL本稿は，竹富島に伝わる伝説『星砂の話』の方言絵本制作過程と，絵本に付属する一般読者向けの文法概要の執筆プロセスについて述べる。沖縄県の八重山諸島の一つ竹富島では，琉球諸語広域八重山語竹富方言が話されており，流暢な話者はほとんど70代以上に限られる消滅危機言語である。まず，この絵本制作企画が属する，「言語復興の港」プロジェクトについて概観し，なぜ言語学を専門とする著者らが他分野のプロフェッショナルや地元の人々と協働して絵本（や他の企画では方言グッズなど）を制作しているのかについて概観する。そして，この絵本の想定読者に向けて，絵本の内容を方言で理解できるようになることを目標にした一般読者向けの文法概要の執筆過程について説明する。表記法（そして竹富方言の発音方法），格助詞・係助詞，動詞・形容詞・終助詞の説明など，一般向けにわかりやすく書くことに気をつけるだけでなく，必ずしも言語学的でないが一般読者が疑問に思いがちなこと（e.g., XとYのどちらが「正しい」のか）にも留意して執筆した。また，専門的な文法概要のように必ずしも網羅性には配慮せず，絵本の表現を理解できるようになることを目標に執筆した。このことの利点と欠点に関しても簡単に触れる。最後に，文法概要とそれに含まれる物語本文を収録した。本稿が，今後同様のコンテンツを作ろうとする人々の一助となれば幸いである。We describe the procedure of making a picture book, A Tale of Star Sand, in Taketomi Dialect, which is spoken in Taketomi Island, Yaeyama, Okinawa, Japan, and of writing a grammar sketch for a general audience about this dialect. Taketomi Dialect (teedun+muni “Taketomi+speech”) belongs to the Ryu...
国立国語研究所 研究系 言語変異研究領域Language Variation Division, Research Department, NINJAL本稿は，青森県上北郡野辺地町で話されている... more 国立国語研究所 研究系 言語変異研究領域Language Variation Division, Research Department, NINJAL本稿は，青森県上北郡野辺地町で話されている，南部方言の一変種の音韻を記述する。野辺地町について簡単に紹介したあと，母音，子音，音節構造に関してそれぞれ議論する。共通語化の影響により，母音も子音も揺れが大きく，その「揺れ幅」によってしか音素を同定できないと主張する。特に /i,u/ の認定が困難で，共通語との対応が意識されない語における [ɨ] は揺れがないものもあるため，音素の同定に問題が生じることを指摘する。音節構造に関しては，長母音は認定せず，長子音とコーダ位置の /n/ を認定するが，認定方法にはまだ課題が残されていることを指摘する。This paper describes the phonology of the Noheji Dialect, a variation of the Nambu Dialect, spoken in Noheji-machi, Kamikita, of the Aomori Prefecture. After an overview of Noheji-machi, the study discusses vowel and consonant inventories and phonotactics. It is argued that a phoneme can be identified only by counting variations because there are wide variations of a phoneme, which are influenced by Standard Japanese. Specifically, phonemes /i, u/ are difficult to define. The phone [ɨ] can be either /i/ or /u/. However, [ɨ] is sometimes pronounced only as [ɨ] without any variations, in which case it is difficult to decipher whether it is /i...
東京外国語大学大学院 博士後期課程国立国語研究所 コーパス開発センター千葉大学人文科学研究院 特任研究員国立国語研究所 コーパス開発センター 非常勤研究員Ph.D. Student, Tokyo... more 東京外国語大学大学院 博士後期課程国立国語研究所 コーパス開発センター千葉大学人文科学研究院 特任研究員国立国語研究所 コーパス開発センター 非常勤研究員Ph.D. Student, Tokyo University of Foreign StudiesCenter for Corpus Development, NINJALResearch Fellow, Graduate School of Humanities, Chiba UniversityAdjunct Researcher, Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL本稿では，『現代日本語書き言葉均衡コーパス』のテキスト（新聞（PN）コアデータ16サンプル）内の名詞句に対し，情報構造に関係する文法情報のラベル（情報状態，共有性，定性，特定性，有生性，有情性，動作主性）をアノテーションした結果を報告する。特に，本稿ではアノテーションの概要と基礎統計について述べる。ラベル間の対応をKappa値で評価した結果，先行研究で既にアノテーションされていた共参照情報を基にした情報状態と定性・特定性の間には中程度の一致（0.41以上）が見られたのに対し，今回新たに付与した共有性と定性・特定性の間にはほとんど完璧な一致（0.81以上）が見られた。冠詞選択に大きな影響を与える定性・特定性のアノテーションは，定性・特定性が話し手側により踏み込んだ概念であることから複雑で難度が高いため，他の文法情報で定性・特定性を推定する方がより容易であると考えられる。評価の結果は，定性・特定性の推定には，共参照情報を基にした情報状態だけでは十分でなく，聞き手／読み手の観点を考慮した共有性が重要であることを意味している。また，日本語では助詞「は」と「が」の使い分けについて，情報構造との関連が指摘されているが，付属語主辞とのラベルの関係を見ると，「が」「を」「に」は新情報が多く，「は」は若干旧情報が多いこと，「は」「の」に定性・特定のものが多く，「を」に不定・不特定のものが多いことがわかった。This paper presents the information structure\u27s annotation data (information status, commonness, definite...
Synopsis: This study explores information structure (IS) within the framework of corpus linguisti... more Synopsis: This study explores information structure (IS) within the framework of corpus linguistics and functional linguistics. As a case study, it investigates IS phenomena in spoken Japanese: particles including so-called topic particles, case particles, and zero particles; word order; and intonation. The study discusses how these phenomena are related to cognitive and communicative mechanisms of humans
York at Buffalo, ***JSPS { nakaga wan a tuko, yokornori. d, asaoki tan} ®grnail. corn
元資料: 宮良信詳 (編著)『うちなーぐち活用辞典』, 東京: 国立国語研究所 言語変異研究領域, 2021
There are eight (UNESCO), twelve (Ethnologue), or more (degree of intelligibility) endangered lan... more There are eight (UNESCO), twelve (Ethnologue), or more (degree of intelligibility) endangered languages/dialects in Japan. We present a database and digital archiving space that NINJAL (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics) is developing for all of these languages where individual researchers or language communities can deposit their field data, language documentation, or audio-visual recordings. Two major features of the database/archiving space include (i) that it is a Japanese-mediated database/archive and thus virtually everyone in Japan can use it, and (ii) that it comes with an online exhibition space so that archiving is tightly connected to public use of the deposited items. 日本には 8(ユネスコ)、12(エスノローグ)、もしくはそれ以上(相互理解性)の消滅の危機に瀕した言語・方言が 存在する。本発表は国立国語研究所がこれらの言語・方言のために開発中の、個別の研究者や言語コミュニティが 利用可能なデータベースおよび電子的アーカイブスペースについて報告する。データベース・アーカイブスペース は以下の二つの特徴を持つ。(i) 日本語によるデータベース・アーカイブスペースであり、日本に住む誰もが利用可 能である。(ii)オンライン展示スペースが付随し、アーカイブされるデータが社会一般に対する公開と密接に結びついている。
Handbook of Japanese Applied Linguistics, 2016
This is a database of words and expressions of Hatoma language (Yaeyaman, Southern Ryukyuan). Alm... more This is a database of words and expressions of Hatoma language (Yaeyaman, Southern Ryukyuan). Almost all lexical entries have corresponding audio files, spoken and recorded by the first author. Follow the readme file in NINJAL repository.
Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech, 2013
In this paper, we focus on cases where Japanese speakers overtly express a topic phrase that coul... more In this paper, we focus on cases where Japanese speakers overtly express a topic phrase that could have been omitted. We call this phenomenon anti-zero-pronominalization and hypothesize that this helps speakers gain time for planning a following utterance; anti-zero-pronominalization is another option to deal with cognitive load at the beginning of an utterance in addition to fillers and other speech disfluencies. Based on a quantitative analysis of a corpus of spontaneous Japanese dialogs, we investigate the difference between overt topic NPs and zero-pronouns. We show that i) the utterance is more complex when the topic is expressed as an overt NP than when it is expressed as a zero-pronoun; ii) turn-initial items such as fillers are produced less frequently when overt NPs appear than when zero-pronouns appear; and iii) the utterance becomes more complex when the last mora of the topic is more prolonged.
International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 2012
This paper proposes a basic scheme for annotating anaphoric relations in Japanese conversations. ... more This paper proposes a basic scheme for annotating anaphoric relations in Japanese conversations. More specifically, we propose methods of (i) dividing discourse segments into meaningful units, (ii) identifying zero pronouns and other overt anaphors, (iii) classifying zero pronouns, and (iv) identifying anaphoric relations. We discuss various kinds of problems involved in the annotation mainly caused by on-line processing of discourse and/or interactions between the participants. These problems do not arise in annotating written languages. This paper also proposes a method to compute topic continuity based on anaphoric relations. The topic continuity involves the information status of the noun in question (given, accessible, and new) and persistence (whether the noun is mentioned multiple times or not). We show that the topic continuity correlates with short-utterance units, which are determined prosodically through the previous annotations; nouns of high topic continuity tend to be prosodically separated from the predicates. This result indicates the validity of our annotations of anaphoric relations and topic continuity and the usefulness for further studies on discourse and interaction.
The Japanese language is written without the use of articles. Therefore, when translating from Ja... more The Japanese language is written without the use of articles. Therefore, when translating from Japanese to languages with articles by either humans or machines, issues in article selection arise, which are affected by the information structure (definiteness, specificity, and others) of the source language. This paper presents the annotation data of the information structure (information status, commonness, definiteness, specificity, animacy, sentience, agentivity) of the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese,” to address article selection issues in translation. We present the annotation schema and statistics. Evaluation using the Kappa value demonstrates that there is a correspondence between the information status, commonness, definiteness, and specificity. Thus, we conclude that these grammatical labels affect article selection.
In this study, we report the discovery of a new word-tone type in one of the endangered Southern ... more In this study, we report the discovery of a new word-tone type in one of the endangered Southern Ryukyuan languages, Shiraho, spoken in Ishigaki island, Japan. From our observations, we noticed that the tonal pattern that had been described as falling in the previous literature may actually have conflated two distinct tones, which correspond to two different tonal classes of the closest dialect Hateruma; Hateruma falling tone corresponds to Shiraho falling 1 (Fa1) and rising tone to falling 2 (Fa2). In order to confirm this, we conducted an acoustic analysis of the recordings of 3 speakers, analyzing respectively 17, 17, and 14 words pronounced in isolation. We measured the difference between F0 peak and average F0 of last 80ms of each word and found, for 2 speakers, a statistically significant difference between Fa1 and Fa2. Although no difference was obtained for the last speaker, further study using sentences with the target words followed by a case particle clearly showed that t...
This thesis investigates the associations between information structure and linguistic forms in s... more This thesis investigates the associations between information structure and linguistic forms in spoken Japanese mainly by analyzing spoken corpora. It proposes multi-dimensional annotation and analysis procedures of spoken corpora and explores the relationships between information structure and particles, word order, and intonation. Particles, word order, and intonation in spoken Japanese have been investigated separately in different frameworks and different subfields in the literature; there was no unified theory to account for the whole phenomena. This thesis investigated the phenomena as a whole in a consistent way by annotating all target expressions in the same criteria and by employing the same analytical framework. Chapter 1 outlines the questions to be investigated and introduces the methodology of this thesis. Chapter 2 reviews the literature of Japanese linguistics as well as the literature on information structure in different languages. Chapter 3 proposes the analytical...
acsu.buffalo.edu
... Marking Continuous Topics in Japanese Natsuko Nakagawa, Daisuke Yokomori, & Yoshihiko Asa... more ... Marking Continuous Topics in Japanese Natsuko Nakagawa, Daisuke Yokomori, & Yoshihiko Asao Kyoto University 05/02/2009 The 3rd Conference on Language, Discourse, and Cognition National Taiwan University ...
2nd UK Post Graduate …, 2008
The relationships between phonological size and the role of intonation units in Japanese discours... more The relationships between phonological size and the role of intonation units in Japanese discourse Natsuko Nakagawa, Daisuke Yokomori, & Yoshihiko Asao Kyoto University 08/08/2008 2nd UK Post Graduate Conference in Cognitive Linguistics at University of Brighton ...
Uploads
Papers by Natsuko Nakagawa