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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."