When we fail to question in Japanese

When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions

Financial Liberalization and Japan's Agricultural Cooperatives

The system of agricultural cooperatives, called JA, is one of the most politically powerful organizations in Japan, and it has continuously called for agricultural protection. In spite of its importance, information on JA's banking and insurance businesses has been limited for foreign researchers because of the uniqueness and complexity of the JA system. This paper provides a clear understanding of JA's activities and explains the political dynamics in Japan's agricultural sector. Up until the early 1990s, JA could count on stable profits from its banking and insurance businesses because of the government's favorable treatment of JA. Using these profits, JA had been successfully forming farmers into a solid voting group until the mid-1990s. However, the government gradually abandoned its favorable treatment of JA in order to introduce more competition in financial markets. As a result, profitability of J's banking and insurance businesses became unstable in the mid-1990s. The mid-1990s can be regarded as the turning point of the political dynamics of Japan's agricultural sector. As JA lost stable profits, its organizing ability and political power also weakened. The political pressure for agricultural protection also decreased. Because of this decrease in political pressure, there is now a prime opportunity for the Japanese government to reform its agricultural policies. It is not agricultural market and/or trade liberalization that is providing this opportunity. Instead, financial liberalization is providing this opportunity.Agribusiness, Financial Economics, E5, Q13, Q18,

Electrostatic force spectroscopy of near-surface localized states

Electrostatic force microscopy at cryogenic temperatures is used to probe the electrostatic interaction of a conductive atomic force microscopy tip and electronic charges trapped in localized states in an insulating layer on a semiconductor. Measurement of the frequency shift of the cantilever as a function of tip-sample shows discrete peaks at certain voltages when the tip is located near trap centers. These discrete changes in frequency is attributed to one by one filling of individual electronic states when the quantized energies traverses the substrate conduction band fermi energy as tip-sample voltage is increased. Theoretical analysis of the experiment suggests that such measurement of the cantilever frequency shift as a function of bias voltage can be interpreted as an AC force measurement, from which spectroscopic information about the location, energy and tunneling times of localized states can be deduced. Experimental results from study of a sample with InAs quantum dots as trap centers is presented.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure