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In Japanese, direct combination of verbs or adjectives by coordination (with to 'and') or juxtaposition (with its empty counterpart) can form a NP, if the conjuncts are antonymous to each other; the coordinator to 'and' can combine only NPs elsewhere. We claim that this is because there is a phonetically empty nominalizer that can nominalize each conjunct, and that the new nominal construction has been gradually developing in the history of Japanese. An acceptability-rating experiment targeting 400 participants shows that the younger speakers were likely to judge this construction more acceptable than the older ones, that this tendency is slightly weaker in the Nominative condition than in the Genitive condition, and that the coordination condition was significantly worse than the juxtaposition condition.
Sprachtechnologie für übersetzungsgerechtes Schreiben am Beispiel Deutsch, Englisch, Japanisch
(2009)
Wir [...] haben uns zur Aufgabe gesetzt, Wege zu finden, wie linguistisch basierte Software den Prozess des Schreibens technischer Dokumentation unterstützen kann. Dabei haben wir einerseits die Schwierigkeiten im Blick, die japanische und deutsche Autoren (und andere Nicht-Muttersprachler des Englischen) beim Schreiben englischer Texte haben. Besonders japanische Autoren haben mit Schwierigkeiten zu kämpfen, weil sie hochkomplexe Ideen in einer Sprache ausdrücken müssen, die von Informationsstandpunkt her sehr unterschiedlich zu ihrer Muttersprache ist. Andererseits untersuchen wir technische Dokumentation, die von Autoren in ihrer Muttersprache geschrieben wird. Obwohl hier die fremdsprachliche Komponente entfällt, ist doch auch erhebliches Verbesserungspotential vorhanden. Das Ziel ist hier, Dokumente verständlich, konsistent und übersetzungsgerecht zu schreiben. Der fundamentale Ansatz in der Entwicklung linguistisch-basierter Software ist, dass gute linguistische Software auf Datenmaterial basiert und sich an den konkreten Zielen der besseren Dokumentation orientiert.
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.
In this text, we describe the development of a broad coverage grammar for Japanese that has been built for and used in different application contexts. The grammar is based on work done in the Verbmobil project (Siegel 2000) on machine translation of spoken dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The second application for JACY was the automatic email response task. Grammar development was described in Oepen et al. (2002a). Third, it was applied to the task of understanding material on mobile phones available on the internet, while embedded in the project DeepThought (Callmeier et al. 2004, Uszkoreit et al. 2004). Currently, it is being used for treebanking and ontology extraction from dictionary definition sentences by the Japanese company NTT (Bond et al. 2004).
It is one of the most highly debated issues in loanword phonology whether loanword adaptations are phonologically or phonetically driven. This paper addresses this issue and aims at demonstrating that only the acceptance of both a phonological as well as a phonetic approximation stance can adequately account for the data found in Japanese. This point will be exemplified with the adaptation of German and French mid front rounded vowels in Japanese. It will be argued that the adaptation of German /oe/ and /ø/ as Japanese /e/ is phonologically grounded, whereas the adaptation of French /oe/ and /ø/ as Japanese /u/ is phonetically grounded. This asymmetry in the adaptation process of German and French mid front rounded vowels and further examples of loans in Japanese lead to the only conclusion that both strategies of loanword adaptation occur in languages. It will be shown that not only perception, but also the influence of orthography, of conventions and the knowledge of the source language play a role in the adaptation process.
This paper proposes an annotating scheme that encodes honorifics (respectful words). Honorifics are used extensively in Japanese, reflecting the social relationship (e.g. social ranks and age) of the referents. This referential information is vital for resolving zero
pronouns and improving machine translation outputs. Annotating honorifics is a complex task that involves identifying a predicate with honorifics, assigning ranks to referents of the
predicate, calibrating the ranks, and connecting referents with their predicates.
While the sortal constraints associated with Japanese numeral classifiers are well-studied, less attention has been paid to the details of their syntax. We describe an analysis implemented within a broad-coverage HPSG that handles an intricate set of numeral classifier construction types and compositionally relates each to an appropriate semantic representation, using Minimal Recursion Semantics.
The Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative (DELH-IN) provides the infrastructure needed to produce open-source semantic transfer-based machine translation systems. We have made available a prototype Japanese-English machine translation system built from existing resources include parsers, generators, bidirectional grammars and a transfer engine.
Quantificational determiners in Japanese can be marked with genitive case. Current analyses (for example by Watanabe, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, to appear) treat the genetive case marker in these cases as semantically vacuous, but we show that it has semantic effects. We propose a new analysis as reverse partitives. Following Jackendoff (MIT-Press, 1977), we assume that partitives always contain two NPs one of which is phonologically deleted. We claim that, while in normal partitives the higher noun is deleted, in reverse partitives the lower noun is deleted.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
Japanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project, present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as a means of testing linguistic hypotheses.
While the sortal constraints associated with Japanese numeral classifiers are wellstudied, less attention has been paid to the details of their syntax. We describe an analysis implemented within a broadcoverage HPSG that handles an intricate set of numeral classifier construction types and compositionally relates each to an appropriate semantic representation, using Minimal Recursion Semantics.
In her discussion of the Japanese adversative passive, Anna Wierzbicka writes (1988: 260): “The problem is extremely interesting and important both for intrinsic reasons and because of its wider methodological implications. It can be formulated like this: if one form can be used in a number of different ways, are we entitled to postulate for it a number of different meanings or should we rather search for one semantic common denominator (regarded as the MEANING of the form in question) and attribute the variety of uses to the interaction between this meaning and the linguistic or extralinguistic context?” Though it “may seem obvious” that the second stand is “methodologically preferable” (261), she takes the first position and concludes that “the Japanese passive has to be recognized as multiply ambiguous” (286). In the following I intend to show that this view is both wrong and fruitful.
S.R. Ramsey writes (1979: 162): "The patterning of tone marks in Old Kyoto texts divides the vocabulary into virtually the same classes as those arrived at by comparing the accent distinctions found in the modern dialects. This means that the Old Kyoto dialect had a pitch system similar to that of proto-Japanese. The standard language of the Heian period may not actually be the ancestor of all the dialects of Japan, but at least as far as the accent system is concerned, it is close enough to the proto system to be used as a working model. The significance of this fact is important: It means that each of the dialects included in the comparison has as much to tell, at least potentially, as any other dialect about Old Kyoto accent."
While both Japanese and English have a grammatic al form denoting the progressive, the two forms (te-iru & be+ing) interact differently with the inherent semantics of the verb to which they attach (Kindaichi, 1950; McClure, 1995; Shirai, 2000). Japanese change of state verbs are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only a resultative interpretation of V+ te-iru, while a progressive interpretation is preferred for activity predicates. English be+ing denotes a progressive interpretation regardless of the lexical semantics of the verb. The question that arises is how we can account for the fact that change of state verbs like dying can denote a progressive interpretation in English, but not in Japanese. While researchers such as Kageyama (1996) and Ogihara (1998, 1999) propose that the difference lies in the lexical semantics of the verbs themselves, others such as McClure (1995) have argued that the difference lies in the semantics of the grammatical forms, be+ing and te-iru. We present results from an experimental study of Japanese learners’ interpretation of the English progressive which provide support for McClure’s proposal. Results indicate that independent of verb type, learners had significantly more difficulty with the past progressive. We argue that knowledge of L2 semantics-syntax correspondences proceeds not on the basis of L1 lexical semantic knowledge, but on the basis of grammatical forms.
We present a broad coverage Japanese grammar written in the HPSG formalism with MRS semantics. The grammar is created for use in real world applications, such that robustness and performance issues play an important role. It is connected to a POS tagging and word segmentation tool. This grammar is being developed in a multilingual context, requiring MRS structures that are easily comparable across languages.
We present a solution for the representation of Japanese honorifical information in the HPSG framework. Basically, there are three dimensions of honorification. We show that a treatment is necessary that involves both the syntactic and the contextual level of information. The japanese grammar is part of a machine translation system.
This paper corroborates the interpretability proposal of Chomsky (1995) with evidence from scrambling in Japanese and German. First it is shown that scrambling in Japanese is semantically vacuous, whereas scrambling in German is semantically contentful. Chomsky’s proposal then predicts that the feature driving Japanese scrambling is erased after checking, while the corresponding feature in German remains visible, specifically for the Shortest Attract condition. Looking at patterns of movement that result in overlapping paths, this prediction is seen to be correct.
Particles fullfill several distinct central roles in the Japanese language. They can mark arguments as well as adjuncts, can be functional or have semantic functions. There is, however, no straightforward matching from particles to functions, as, e.g., 'ga' can mark the subject, the object or the adjunct of a sentence. Particles can cooccur. Verbal arguments that could be identified by particles can be eliminated in the Japanese sentence. And finally, in spoken language particles are often omitted. A proper treatment of particles is thus necessary to make an analysis of Japanese sentences possible. Our treatment is based on an empirical investigation of 800 dialogues. We set up a type hierarchy of particles motivated by their subcategorizational and modificational behaviour. This type hierarchy is part of the Japanese syntax in VERBMOBIL.
A comprehensive investigation of Japanese particle was missing up to now. General implications were set up without the fact that a comprehensive analysis was carried out. [...] We offer a lexicalist treatment of the problem. Instead of assuming different phrase structure rules we state a type hierarchy of Japanese particles. This makes a uniform treatment of phrase structure as well as a differentiation of subcategorization patterns possible.
Eins der signifikanten Probleme in der maschinellen Übersetzung japanische in deutsche Sprache ist die fehlende Information und Definitheit im japanischen Analyse-Output. Eine effiziente Lösung dieses Problems ist es, die Suche nach der relevanten Information in den Transfer zu integrieren. Transferregeln werden mit Präferenzregeln und Default-Regeln kombiniert. Dadurch wird Information über lexikalische Restriktionen der Zielsprache, über die Domäne und über den Diskurs zugänglich.
Die Domäne in VERBMOBIL sind Terminaushandlungsdialoge. Für die Syntax bedeutet das zunächst, daß die Sytnax sich an gesprochener Sprache orientieren muß. Das beinhaltet Nullanaphern, Phrasen, die auf die Kommunikationssituation bezogen sind und Phrasen, die für geschriebene Sprache als nicht wohlgeformt bezeichnet werden. Weitergehend gibt es einige domänenspezifische syntaktische besonderheiten, wie zum Biepsiel die Realisierung von Zeitangaben.
Preferences and defaults for definiteness and number in japanese to german machine translation
(1996)
A significant problem when translating Japanese dialogues into German is the missing information on number and definiteness in the Japanese analysis output. The integration of the search for such information into the transfer process provides an efficient solution. General transfer includes conditions to make it possible to consider external knowledge. Thereby, grammatical and lexical knowledge of the source language, knowledge of lexical restrictions on the target language, domain knowledge and discourse knowledge are accessible.
Some requirements for a VERBMOBIL system capable of processing Japanese dialogue input have been explored. Based on a pilot study in the VERBMOBIL domain, dialogues between 2 participants and a professional Japanese interpreter have been analyzed with respect to a very typical and frequent feature: zero pronouns. Zero pronouns in Japanese texts or dialogues as well as overt pronouns in English texts or dialogues are an important element of discourse coherence. As to translation, this difference in the use of pronouns is a case of translation mismatch: information not explicitly expressed in the source language is needed in the target language. (Verb argument positions, normally obligatory in English, are rather frequently omitted in Japanese. Furthermore, verbs in Japanese are not marked with respect to features necessary for pronoun selection in English.)
Das Problem des Transfers in der maschinellen Übersetzung von Japanisch nach Englisch ist fehlende Information über Numerus und Definitheit im Japanischen, die für die Wahl der englischen Artikel und die Nomenmarkierung gebraucht wird. Obwohl dieses Problem signifikant ist, beschäftigt sich die Forschungsliteratur kaum damit. [...] Wir bsaieren unsere Untersuchungen auf experimentell erhobenen Daten aus einem Experiment über deutsch-japanische gedolmetschte Terminaushandlungsdialoge [...]. Auf diese Weise können Phänomene bestimmt werden, die für die Domäne von VERBMOBIL relevant sind. Wir sehen unser Vorgehen in Übereinstimmung mit dem 'Sublanguage'-Ansatz [...].
Ein einer Äußerung können Nullpronomina aus mehreren [...] Gruppen vorkommen. Die [...] Gruppen können auf die Ebenen eines Schicht-Dialogmodells bezogen werden; andererseits können sie Hinweise geben, welche Informationen in einem Dialogmodell verfügbar sein sollten. Dies wird in der Folgezeit genauer zu untersuchen sein. Im folgenden werden die genannten Typen von Nullpronomina genauer dargestellt und Lösungsverfahren zum Auffinden der Referenten genannt.
Als eine der grundlegenden Systematisierungen im Bereich der Kausativität und damit – aus der Sicht des Kölner Universalienprojekts – der Technik KAUSATIVIERUNG – hat sich meines Erachtens die von Comrie (1981:165ff) eingeführte – und von H. Seiler wiederaufgenommene (1984:67) – und als Kontinuum angeordnete, Dreiteilung in analytische (= periphrastische), morphologische und lexikalische Bildungen erwiesen. Im Mittelpunkt des folgenden Aufsatzes steht der Versuch, im Tagalog, der wichtigsten philippinischen Sprache, diese drei Erscheinungsformen der Kausativierung zu untersuchen und systematisch aufeinander zu beziehen. Dabei ist von besonderer Relevanz, daß in diesem Zusammenhang der semanto-syntaktischen Eigenheit des Tagalog als Vertreter des aktiscischen Sprachbaus wesentliche Bedeutung zukommt. Weiterhin ist zu berücksichtigen, daß aus der Sich der Gesamtdimension PARTIZIPATION Phänomene aus anderen Techniken (z .B. aus der TRANSITIVIERUNG) nicht unerwähnt bleiben dürfen. Auf diese Weise führt die vorliegende Arbeit letztlich dazu, Zusammenhänge zwischen TRANSITIVIERUNG und KAUSATIVIERUNG in Form von kontinuierlichen Übergängen aufzuzeigen.
Der vorliegende Arbeitsbericht ist die Zusammenfassung eines Beitrags zu einem von Prof, Dr. H. Seiler geleitetem "Field-work-Seminar" mit Japanisch als exemplarischer Objektsprache. In diesem Seminar wurden praktische Verfahren und Methoden erörtert, die der Linguist im field work benutzen muß, um seine Arbeit, Data zu kollationieren und diese gleichzeitig auch schon einer Voranalyse zu unterziehen, rationell und deskriptiv adäquat durchzuführen. […] Die Ausdrücke "phonetisch", "phonemisch", ':morphophonemisch" etc. sind im folgenden lediglich als prätheoretische Begriffe aufzufassen. Die Übergänge von einer "phonetischen" zu einer "phonemischen" und von dieser zu einer "morphophonemlschen" Notierung usw. sind hier verstanden als nach gewissen Plausibilitätskriterien durchgeführte Abstrahierungen, die ein sinnvolles Aufstellen und Behandeln des Corpus ermöglichen sollen. Damit ist die Frage der, Struktur und des Status eines "morphophonemischen Teils" im Rahmen eines spezifischen Grammatikmodells weder gestellt noch beantwortet.