Ellipsis and wa-marking in Japanese Conversation

John Fry

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English

Routledge
16 May 2003

Semantics; Grammar, syntax

Series: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics

This book investigates the operation of two linguistic mechanisms, ellipsis and wa -marking, in a corpus of

colloquial Japanese speech. Its data set is the CallHome Japanese (CHJ) corpus, a collection of transcripts and digitized speech data for 120 telephone conversations between native speakers of Japanese. To make the CHJ data useful for linguistic research, John Fry annotates the original transcripts

with a comprehensive set of acoustic, phonetic, syntactic and semantic tags. John Fry demonstrates that Japanese conversation obeys certain principles of argument ellipsis that appear to be language universal: namely, the tendency to omit transitive and human subjects and the tendency to express no

more than one argument per clause. He identifies a set of syntactic and semantic factors that correlate significantly with the ellipsis of grammatical particles following a noun phrase. These factors include the grammatical construction type (question, idiom), length of the NP, utterance length, proximity of the NP to the predicate, and the animacy and definiteness of the NP. The animacy and definiteness constrains are of particular interest because these too seem to reflect language-universal principles. Analyzing the CHJ data further, Fry investigates the use and function of the topic-marking particle wa . His study identifies a set of semantic and prosodic properties that tend to distinguish wa from

the subject-marking particle ga .

By: John Fry
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 430g
ISBN: 9780415967648
ISBN 10: 0415967643
Series: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
Pages: 220
Publication Date: 16 May 2003
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

John Fry received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2002, and is currently a consultant at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). His research interests include natural language processing, speech processing, and Japanese semantics and syntax.