Indexing \u27Entrustment\u27: An Analysis of the Japanese Formulaic Construction [N da yo N]

Japanese conversations are known to contain a large amount of unexpressed information. When a speaker speaks with elliptical information, he or she assumes that the addressee will understand what is not overtly expressed based on the knowledge that is supposed to be shared textually, personally or culturally. The addressee, on the other hand, must determine what is not being expressed overtly using such shared knowledge. At the heart of this kind of communication is the existence of trust assumed among the interlocutors. Using the term \u27entrustment\u27, we will examine how one particular Japanese formulaic construction, [Noun (da) yo Noun ], \u27It\u27s Noun, you know, Noun\u27, indexes mutual trust to manage conversational interaction. We will argue that this meta-pragmatic awareness needs to be recognized beyond surface interactional patterns identified in conversation

Creating the Middle Ground Register in Thai Conversation

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Discourse in Southeast Asian Languages (1995

Paving ways to documenting an invisible linguistic minority in Japan: Ikema

This presentation introduces our collaborative project (involving researchers from Canada, Japan, and the U.S.) on the language of Ikema in Okinawa, Japan. We highlight the problems we encountered and our attempts to overcome them - a necessary step before engaging in “Documentary Linguistics” (Himmelmann 1998) on Ikema. Ikema is a typical endangered language: no longer acquired by children and only spoken by a decreasing number of older speakers. Islanders express concerns that their mother tongue is disappearing, but most feel that the move toward monolingualism in Standard Japanese is inevitable and even desirable. This is an expected outcome; although, linguistically speaking, Ikema and other Okinawan languages should be considered as constituting a separate language group, for many years the Japanese government treated them as merely ‘dialects’ of Japanese. The 1916 government initiative of homogenizing the nation by spreading Standard Japanese was so successful that ‘dialect’ speakers believe that they are speaking inferior versions of Japanese. In fact, remaining Ikema speakers still recall the infamous ‘dialect placards’, which were placed around their necks as a form of punishment when they used Ikema at school. It is thus not surprising that islanders initially showed suspicion and resistance when our team showed interest in Ikema. However, we soon started finding community leaders with concerns about their rapidly disappearing language. Through discussions with us, these leaders started to realize that documenting Ikema for future generations in collaboration with our group is a significant first step. We also recognized the importance of establishing our presence in the community through getting involved in local projects, e.g. a kindergarten teacher’s project of compiling booklets to promote Ikema for the community, and local activists’ attempt to archive and display a large number of precious photos taken by an ethnographer in the 1960’s. By participating in these projects, we have been slowly gaining the trust of the community, which, we hope, will take us to our eventual goal of conducting a large scale community-centered documentation project. In fact, more recently we have been provided with opportunities to record narratives by older speakers (80s-90s), and to work with younger speakers (60s-70s) in eliciting sentences. Knowing their difficult history and our genuine involvement with community activities have been critical in decreasing tensions which existed in the community. These tensions may continue to exist, but we need to keep paving ways toward documenting Ikema and hopefully other invisible minority languages in Okinawa

Factors influencing acute high-grade restenosis in emergency percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty for acute myocardial infarction.

We studied the factors which may induce acute high grade restenosis in emergency percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA). PTCA was attempted in 50 patients with acute myocardial infarction, and the balloon catheter passed successfully across the occlusion site in 47 (94%) of the patients. These 47 patients were analyzed. &#34;Acute restenosis&#34; was defined as a lesion which was revascularized to less than 50% luminal reduction narrowed again to more than 75% luminal reduction 5 min after the balloon inflation. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used for determining factors which significantly influenced acute restenosis. The incidence of at least one restenosis episode was 45%. Multiple regression analysis selected 5 factors associated significantly with an increased rate of acute restenosis: 1) angiographic evidence of dissection, 2) lesion in the right coronary artery (RCA), 3) lack of or insufficient administration of thrombolytic agent preceding PTCA, 4) curved lesion and 5) relatively small balloon/artery diameter ratio. Acute restenosis correlated significantly with late reocclusion. This study indicates that it is important to administer a thrombolytic agent prior to emergency PTCA, and to use an adequately sized balloon to the artery when the acute restenosis occurs by using relatively smaller sized balloon. The present data also demonstrated that patients with RCA and a curved lesion have a relatively high risk of acute restenosis. This study indicates how patients with relatively high risk of acute restenosis may be identified.</p

Small Left Atrium: An Adjunctive Sign of Hemodynamically Compromised Massive Pulmonary Embolism

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a common disease with a high mortality rate due to right ventricular dysfunction and underfilling of the left ventricle. We present a case of a 33-year-old man with hemodynamically compromised massive PE. His left atrium was collapsed with marked dilatation of the right atrium and ventricle on multi-detector-row CT scans. The patient was treated with an intracatheter injection of a mutant tissue-type plasminogen activator and subsequently showed clinical and radiological improvements. The small left atrial size in combination with a right ventricular pressure overload was considered to be an adjunctive sign of hemodynamically compromised massive PE

A Lattice Study of the Nucleon Excited States with Domain Wall Fermions

We present results of our numerical calculation of the mass spectrum for isospin one-half and spin one-half non-strange baryons, i.e. the ground and excited states of the nucleon, in quenched lattice QCD. We use a new lattice discretization scheme for fermions, domain wall fermions, which possess almost exact chiral symmetry at non-zero lattice spacing. We make a systematic investigation of the negative-parity $N^*$ spectrum by using two distinct interpolating operators at $\beta=6/g^2=6.0$ on a $16^3 \times 32 \times 16$ lattice. The mass estimates extracted from the two operators are consistent with each other. The observed large mass splitting between this state, $N^*(1535)$, and the positive-parity ground state, the nucleon N(939), is well reproduced by our calculations. We have also calculated the mass of the first positive-parity excited state and found that it is heavier than the negative-parity excited state for the quark masses studied.Comment: 46 pages, REVTeX, 11 figures included, revised version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.