The So-called Person Restriction of Internal State Predicates in Japanese in Contrast with Thai

Internal state predicates or ISPs refer to internal states of sentient beings, such as emotions, sensations and thought processes. Japanese ISPs with zero pronouns exhibit the “person restriction ” in that the zero form of their subjects must be first person at the utterance time. This paper examines the person restriction of ISPs in Japanese in contrast with those in Thai, which is a zero pronominal language like Japanese. It is found that the person restriction is applicable to Japanese ISPs but not to Thai ones. This paper argues that the person restriction is not adequate to account for Japanese and Thai ISPs. We propose a new constraint to account for this phenomenon, i.e., the Experiencer-Conceptualizer Identity (ECI) Constraint, which states that “The experiencer of the situation/event must be identical with the conceptualizer of that situation/event. ” It is argued that both languages conventionalize the ECI constraint in ISP expressions but differ in how the ECI constraint is conventionalized.

First-person singular pronouns in Japanese: How do they work in conversation?

Subjectivity-- expression of our thoughts and emotions-- is the essence of everyday conversation (e.g., Benveniste, 1971; Scheibman, 2002). Previous studies have found that subjectivity is expressed in a variety of linguistic items in a wide range of languages. First-person singular (1SG) pronouns may be one of the most fundamental linguistic items for expressing subjectivity because they directly reflect the speaker, who is the owner of subjective point of view. This dissertation explores the use of 1SG pronouns in Japanese utilizing the analysis of naturally occurring conversational data. In Japanese, personal pronouns including first person are used infrequently, especially in spoken language, and the first-person reference is often unexpressed (what is known as pronoun ellipsis). Although they may look odd or ill-formed from the perspective of languages that have rigid syntactic structures such as English, utterances with unexpressed elements can be considered to be the default\u27 in Japanese conversation. Because of the variability of expression of 1SG pronouns, it is assumed that they add some pragmatic functions when they are explicitly expressed. Data analyses of 1SG pronouns taken from naturally occurring conversation revealed that the use is often motivated by various discourse-pragmatic functions such as expressing subjectivity, introducing a topic, and holding the floor rather than referential necessity. The speaker decides to use 1SG pronouns or not to use them in order to achieve his or her particular communicative goals. First-person singular pronouns in Japanese are a versatile linguistic item beyond so-called pronouns that simply replace nouns. This strongly suggests that 1SG pronouns are essentially different from English I, and will lead us to reconsider the categorization of 1SG pronouns in Japanese. Furthermore, the use and nonuse of 1SG pronouns in Japanese has important educational implications. In order to teach linguistic items that are not syntactically required but are used by pragmatic motivations, I suggest that educators seek more effective teaching methods based on authentic language use.\u2

Subject-tracking and topic continuity in the Church Slavonic translation of the story of Abraham and his niece Mary

The present article addresses issues of referentiality and text cohesion in a Church Slavonic narrative text. Starting with the specific problem of referential conflict as formulated by Kibrik (19871, issues of tracking personal participants in a narrative text are broadly explored in order to arrive at a rationale for the construction of cohesive text interpretation through topic continuity in subject position. The article takes an interpretative text-based approach of close-reading and argues for participant tracking to be dependent on text genre and general cultural prerequisites of text reading and interpretation rather than on systemic grammatical features of language. It is also hinted at the possibility that medieval narrative text genres (like the Byzantine-Slavic hagiographic genre being explored in this paper through the specimen of the Story of Abraham and Mary) may adhere to a type of narrative construction which places more responsibility on the reader-listener than on the narrator

Switch-reference and logophoricity in discourse representation theory

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D86417 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The timing of prominence information during the resolution of German personal and demonstrative pronouns

German personal and demonstrative pronouns have distinct preferences in their interpretation; personal pronouns are more flexible in their interpretation but tend to resolve to a prominent antecedent, while demonstratives have a strong preference for a non-prominent antecedent. However, less is known about how prominence information is used during the process of resolution, particularly in the light of two- stage processing models which assume that reference will normally be to the most accessible candidate. We conducted three experiments investigating how prominence information is used during the resolution of gender-disambiguated personal and demonstrative pronouns in German. While the demonstrative pronoun required additional processing compared to the personal pronoun, prominence information did not affect resolution in shallow conditions. It did, however, affect resolution under deep processing conditions. We conclude that prominence information is not ruled out by the presence of stronger resolution cues such as gender. However, the deployment of prominence information in the evaluation of candidate antecedents is under strategic control

Diachrony of differential argument marking

While there are languages that code a particular grammatical role (e.g. subject or direct object) in one and the same way across the board, many more languages code the same grammatical roles differentially. The variables which condition the differential argument marking (or DAM) pertain to various properties of the NP (such as animacy or definiteness) or to event semantics or various properties of the clause. While the main line of current research on DAM is mainly synchronic the volume tackles the diachronic perspective. The tenet is that the emergence and the development of differential marking systems provide a different kind of evidence for the understanding of the phenomenon. The present volume consists of 18 chapters and primarily brings together diachronic case studies on particular languages or language groups including e.g. Finno-Ugric, Sino-Tibetan and Japonic languages. The volume also includes a position paper, which provides an overview of the typology of different subtypes of DAM systems, a chapter on computer simulation of the emergence of DAM and a chapter devoted to the cross-linguistic effects of referential hierarchies on DAM