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How to be a ham sandwich or an eel: The English deferred equative and the Japanese eel sentence
(2022)
In some languages including English and Japanese, a nominal predicate construction (NPC; "NP1 is NP2") has a marked variety—"open-ended-relation NPCs" (ONPCs), to label it—where the referents of the subject NP and the predicate NP are understood to be in some pragmatically prominent relation other than identity or inclusion (e.g. I'm the ham sandwich 'I'm the customer who ordered the ham sandwich'). The Japanese ONPC has been called the "eel sentence (eel construction)", after an oft-cited example involving unagi 'eel' as its predicate NP. The English ONPC is discussed in good detail by Ward (2004; "Equatives and deferred reference", Language 80) under the rubric of the "deferred equative". The ONPCs in the two languages can be naturally used only under limited discourse configurations, with the English one being more severely constrained than the Japanese one. This work develops semantic analyses of the two ONPCs that improve on previous accounts.
Resultative phrases are generally believed to conform to the Direct Object Restriction: that is, they describe the direct object if verbs are transitive. However, some exceptions have occasionally been reported, and this paper investigates the problem by focusing on resultative phrases that occur with the valency alternation verbs in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Verbs that license the locative alternation and locatum-subject alternation describe events that involve two arguments, the location and the locatum, which are perceived to concurrently undergo a change of state. It will be shown that resultative phrases with a valency alternation verb can be predicated of either argument regardless of whether it is expressed as direct object. Furthermore, resultative verbal suffixes in Mandarin, interpreted as description of either the location or the locatum, give rise to the locative alternation while their interpretation remains the same. Thus, it is claimed that in Japanese and Mandarin, the predication relation of resultative phrases is not determined by the grammatical function of arguments as generally believed, but rather by the lexical semantics of the verbs.
Gapping in Japanese, which is an SOV language, differs from gapping in SVO languages in that the conjuncts with the elided verbs appear in non-final position. In this paper I present an incremental approach to gapping in Japanese, where it is assumed that an argument structure type is constructed in the non-final clause(s) in the gapping construction. This type is unified with the construction type created by the final clause resulting in identical construction types for all conjuncts in the construction.
We examine the fine structure of clausal right-node raising constructions in Japanese, and argue that there are sentences in which a tensed verb is right-node-raised out of coordinated tensed clauses as well as sentences in which a verb stem is right-node-raised out of coordinated tenseless phrases. In the latter case, the tense morpheme has to be assumed to take a tenseless complement clause, and we note that the existence of such a structure contradicts the so-called lexicalist hypothesis, according to which a verb stem and the tense morpheme immediately following it always form a morphosyntactic constituent.
In this paper, it is demonstrated that there is a phenomenon that can be viewed as a mirror image of medial right-node raising and thus might be designated as medial left-node raising, and it is argued that the properties of this phenomenon are consistent with the predictions of the HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination first proposed in Yatabe (2001) and modified in later works such as Yatabe (2015).
This paper addresses some Japanese constructions where the predicate heading a subordinate clause – specifically, a suspensive form of IU 'say', OMOU 'think' or SURU 'do' – appears to be elided. I will discuss that these elliptic constructions are subject to certain syntactic and interpretative constraints which do not apply to their non-elliptic counterparts, and develop an SBCG-analysis that aims to model these constraints without postulating a covert element in the place of the missing verb.
This paper presents an HPSG formalisation of how the ellipsis of case-marking affects the focus of the clause in Japanese. We restrict our attention to the nominative and accusative markers ga and o, and in view of the fact that the ellipsis effects on focushood vary between 1) ga and o and 2) different argument structures of the head verb, develop an essentially lexicalist account that combines both aspects, in which the implicit focus argument position is specified in the predicate. We argue that if a constituent is an implicit focus it does not, while if one is not it does, require a case-marker to be focused.
The Japanese infinitive-clause construction (InfCx) and gerund-clause construction (GerCx), which are the most basic subordination structures (considered as coordination structures by some) in the language, may convey a wide range of interclausal semantic relations, including 'temporal sequence', 'cause', and 'manner', largely due to pragmatic enrichment. This work addresses the question of what the core meaning(s) of the two constructions is (are), and demonstrates (i) that the InfCx and GerCx indicate either that the first-clause eventuality precedes or temporally subsumes the second-clause eventuality or that the two clauses stand in the rhetorical relation of contrast, and (ii) that the GerCx has a distinct sense that the InfCx lacks, which gives rise to the 'resulting state' interpretation.
We will observe which stem allomorph the affixes, the so-called 'non-past' affix, the past affix, the imperative affix, the negative affix and the voice affix-like verbs, select between the longer and the shorter in Japanese-Yanagawa dialect on the assumption that verbal lexemes may be associated with more than one stem. Observing the phenomenon more closely, we found that the verbal stem forms entertain default implicative relations in the stem dependency hierarchy. We will propose i) an implemented analysis of the past affix and ii) an implementation of the allomorph selections by the 'non-past' affix in Koga and Ono, 2010 as two examples.
This paper hypothesizes that transfer-based machine translation systems can be improved by encoding information structure in both the source and target grammars, and preserving information structure in the transfer stage. We explore how information structure can be represented within the HPSG/MRS formalism (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Copestake et al., 2005) and how it can help refine multilingual MT. Building upon that framework, we provide a sample translation between English and Japanese and check the feasibility of the proposals in small-scale translation systems built with the HPSG/MRS-based LOGON MT infrastructure (Oepen et al., 2007). Our experiment shows the information structure-based MT system that we propose in this paper reduces the number of translations 75.71% for Japanese and 80.23% for Korean. The dramatic reductions in the number of translations is expected to make a contribution to our HPSG/MRS-based MT in terms of latency as well as accuracy.