The Short Intonation Unit as a Vehicle of Important Topics

2016

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 framework of the thesis. Major findings are discussed in Chapter 4, 5, and 6. Chapter 4 analyzes the distributions of topic and case particles. It is made clear that so-called topic particles (wa, zero particles, toiuno-wa, and kedo/ga preceded by copula) are mainly sensitive to activation status, whereas case paticles (ga, o, and zero particles) are sensitive to both focushood and argument structure. While the distinc- tion between wa and ga gather much attention in traditional Japanese linguistics, the distribution of different kinds of topic and case particles, including zero particles, are analyzed in this thesis. Chapter 5 studies word order: i.e., clause-initial, pre-predicate, and post-predicate noun phrases. Topical NPs appear either clause-initially or post-predicateively, while focal NPs appear pre-predicatively. Clause-initial and post-predicate NPs are different mainly in activation statuses. The previous literature investigated clause-initial, pre- predicate, and post-predicate constructions in different frameworks; however, there was no unified account for word order in Japanese. The thesis outlines word order in spoken Japanese in a unified framework. Chapter 6 investigates intonation. While the previous literature mainly concen- trates on contrastive focus, this thesis discusses in terms of both topic and focus. It turns out that intonation as a unit of processing and argues that information structure influences on the form of intonation units. Chapter 7 discusses theoretical implications of these findings. Finally, Chapter 8 summarizes the thesis and points out some remaining issues and possible future studies.

Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96, 1996

This study examines the extent to which i n tonation plays a role in the structuring of information in a Japanese monologue. The role of pitch accent in the intonational system of Japanese is very di erent from that in languages like Dutch or English: in Japanese, pitch accent is a lexical property of words and cannot be used to lend prominence to words at the sentence level. Therefore, we w ondered if and how intonation can cue discourse structure in Japanese, comparable to how it is being used in Dutch and English. Results show that fundamental frequency F0, amplitude, and duration of the nal accents in each sentence did not serve t o cue the boundaries of discourse segments, contrary to our expectation. However, pitch range variations on NPs, examined in terms of their position in a discourse segment and their information status, did show a correlation with discourse structure.

Linguistica, 1993

Journal of Pragmatics, 2002

Usually in Japanese, each NP in an argument position must be accompanied by an appropriate case-marker; however, in spontaneous spoken Japanese, the NPs often appear without case-markers (see e.g., Kuno, Susumu, 1973a. Nihon bunpoo kenkyuu. Taishukan Shoten, Tokyo; Kuno, Susumu, 1973b. The Structure of the Japanese Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.; Tsutsui, Michio, 1984. Particle Ellipsis in Japanese. PhD dissertation, University of Illinois; Masunaga, Kiyoko, 1987. Non-thematic Positions and Discourse Anaphora. PhD dissertation, Harvard University; Ono, Tsuyoshi, Thompson, S.A. and Suzuki, R., 2000. Discourse Studies 2, 55–84). This study particularly focuses on the deletion of the nominative case-marker ga from the perspective of information structure. The framework of information structure assumed here is not the binary frameworks such as ‘given/new’, or ‘discourse-old/discourse-new’ (see e.g., Chafe, Wallace, 1976. In: Li, C. (Ed.), Subject and Topic. Academic Press, New York, pp. 25–55, Prince, Ellen, 1981. In: Cole, P. (Ed.), Radical Pragmatics. Academic Press, New York, pp. 223–255; Prince, Ellen, 1992. In: Mann, W.C., Thompson, S.A. (Eds.), Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analysis of a Fund-raising Text. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 295–325), but the framework in which degrees of importance are recognized as a continuum (see e.g., Kuno, Susumo, 1982. Journal of Semantics 1, 120–154). It is demonstrated that the binary frameworks cannot distinguish the entire subject NP deletion from just the nominative case-marker deletion. The most relevant notion for the nominative case-marker deletion in Japanese is the notion of ‘Semiactive’ information proposed by Chafe (Chafe, Wallace, 1994. Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago University Press, Chicago). The generalization proposed in the present study is that when the information status of the subject NP is ‘Inactive’, no element can be deleted from the NP-ga; when it is ‘Semiactive’, ga can be deleted; and when it is predictable, hence ‘Active’, the entire subject NP-ga can be deleted.

2020

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

Linguistica, 2000

Speakers need to plan the following part of speech under the pressure of a temporal imperative at utterance-initial positions. Each language seems to have some devices to solve this prob-lem, which we call utterance-initial elements (UIEs). We in-vestigated effects of two factors, boundary strengths and com-plexity of the following constituents, on the durations of possi-ble UIEs, such as fillers, conjunctions, and topic phrases. We found that the last mora of filler e, as well as wa-marked topic phrases, became longer as the complexity increased in certain conditions. Possible interpretations for the results are discussed.

Linguistic Research, 2020

Recent research on discourse markers (DMs) has been increasingly paying attention to their hypothesized functional asymmetry depending on their position at left- and right-periphery (LP and RP) and the role of prosody, among others. Drawing upon contemporary corpus data in Korean, this paper argues that the LP/RP position does influence the function, yet it is not uniquely correlated with subjectification/ intersubjectification. It further argues that prosodic features indeed play a crucial role in determining DM functions, yet such prosodic features are not unique in DMs only but are in consonance with the patterns in general language use. In addition to these two determinants, there are other factors such as the semantics of source constructions, which serves as the bases of pragmatic inferences in the discursive and interactional contexts. Since pragmatic inferences are largely based on conceptual metonymy, DM functions form a conceptual network by virtue of their relatedness.

Practicing Japan. 35 Years of Japanese Studies in Poznań and Kraków, Poznan: Wydawnictwo Rys, 2023

This chapter argues for importance of context for study of linguistic phenomena, based on different treatments of WA-marked topics in Japanese language research. It points out methodological deficiencies of sytax based approaches and shows the unexpected aspects of WA-marked topics when examined in their context.