Ellipsis and Reference Tracking in Japanese


Book Description

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Shaping the Field of Translation In Japanese ↔ Turkish Contexts I


Book Description

The academic discipline of translation studies is only half a century old and even younger in the field of bilateral translation between Japanese and Turkish. This book is the first volume of the world’s first academic book on Turkish↔Japanese translation. While this volume gathered discussions on translation studies with theoric and applied aspects, literature, linguistics, and philosophy, the second volume deals with the history of translation, philosophy, culture education, language education, and law. It also covers the translation of historical materials and divan poetry. These books will be the first steps to discuss and develop various aspects of the field. Such compilation brings together experienced and young Turkology and Japanology scholars as well as academics linked to translation studies and translation, and also translators. Both volumes contain 24 essays written by twenty-two writers from Japan, Turkey, USA and China. Introduction by Judy WAKABAYASHI, Special notes by Turgay KURULTAY, Esin ESEN, Ryō MIYASHITA, Devrim Çetin GÜVEN, İbrahim Soner ÖZDEMİR, Keichirō ISHII, Nuray AKDEMİR, Ruosheng Sun, Ayşegül ATAY, Ayşe AĞRIŞ




Reference in Discourse


Book Description

This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in natural discourse, during which about every third word usually depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive approach to discourse analysis and by examining the relationship between discourse studies and linguistic typology. He discusses reference as a linguistic phenomenon, in connection with the traditional notions of deixis, anaphora, givenness, and topicality, and describes the way his theoretical approach is centered on notions of referent activation in working memory. He argues that the speaker is responsible for the shape of discourse and that referential expressions should be understood as choices made by speakers rather than as puzzles to be solved by addressees. Kibrik examines the cross-linguistic aspects of reference and the typology of referential devices, including referring expressions per se, such as free and bound pronouns, and referential aids that help to tell apart the concurrently activated entities. This discussion is based on the data from about 200 languages from around the world. He then proposes a comprehensive model of referential choice, in which he draws on concepts from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and applies this to Russian and English. He also draws together his empirical analyses in order to examine what light his analysis of discourse can shed on the way information is processed in working memory. In the final part of the book Andrej Kibrik offers a wider perspective, including deixis, referential aspects of gesticulation and signed languages. This pioneering work will interest linguists and cognitive scientists interested in discourse, reference, typology, and the operations of working memory in linguistic communication.




Storytelling across Japanese Conversational Genre


Book Description

This book investigates how Japanese participants accommodate to and make use of genre-specific characteristics to make stories tellable, create interpersonal involvement, negotiate responsibility, and show their personal selves. The analyses of storytelling in casual conversation, animation narratives, television talk shows, survey interviews, and large university lectures focus on participation/participatory framework, topical coherence, involvement, knowledge, the story recipient’s role, prosody and nonverbal behavior. Story tellers across genre are shown to use linguistic/paralinguistic (prosody, reported speech, style shifting, demonstratives, repetition, ellipsis, co-construction, connectives, final particles, onomatopoeia) and nonverbal (gesture, gaze, head nodding) devices to involve their recipients, and recipients also use a multiple of devices (laughter, repetition, responsive forms, posture changes) to shape the development of the stories. Nonverbal behavior proves to be a rich resource and constitutive feature of storytelling across genre. The analyses also shed new light on grammar across genre (ellipsis, demonstratives, clause combining), and illustrate a variety of methods for studying genre.




Meta-informative Centering in Utterances


Book Description

The notion of information has nowadays become crucial both in our daily life and in many branches of science and technology. In language studies, this notion was used as a technical term for the first time about at least fifty years ago. It is argued, however, that "Old" and "New", used traditionally for characterising information, refer in fact to the meta-informative status of communicated chunks of information. They provide information about other information. Since subjects and objects, as attention-driven phrases, are also related to aboutness, the presented Meta-Informative Centering (MIC) framework includes predication theory. By applying the MIC theory to their analyses of English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Greek, Latin, and Japanese, the authors provide comprehensive explanations of the most puzzling aspects of the pragmatic use of basic universal linguistic categories. It seems clear now that canonical syntactic patterns, their permutations, and diverse transformations do indeed reflect very truly the meta-informative encapsulation of utterances. As a consequence, this book presents new and coherent theoretical solutions as well as their very efficient applications.




Handbook of Japanese Semantics and Pragmatics


Book Description

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.




Linguistics in the Twenty First Century


Book Description

This book is the result of the cooperation between Cambridge Scholars Press and the Centre for Applied Linguistics of the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment of Santiago de Cuba. The present volume is a peer-reviewed selection from the papers written in English that were presented at the 9th International Symposium on Social Communication (Santiago de Cuba, January 24-28, 2005). The symposia are held by the Santiago-based institution every two years. Since their inception in 1987, these meetings have provided an excellent opportunity for scientific exchange among scholars from all continents, through the presentation of papers, keynote speeches, and workshops focusing on the most current and recent results of linguistics and other related disciplines that are also invited to the event. This volume includes 34 papers subdivided in eight sections: General Linguistics (8), Phonetics (5), Lexicology (3), Corpus Linguistics (2), Natural Language Processing (9), Foreign Languages (3), Mass Media (2) and Art, Ethnology and Folklore (2). These articles provide an excellent overview of the current state of research from around the world. Scholars came from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Cuba, Spain, United States, France, Greek, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal and the United Kingdom. It is important to highlight the presence in this book of papers by some of the world’s leading researchers in linguistics, including Prof. Dr. Anton Nijholt, from Twente University, Enschede, The Netherlands; Prof. Dr. Nicoletta Calzolari, director of the prestigious Institute of Computational Linguistics of Pisa, Italy; Prof. Dr. Michael Zock, from the Scientific Research Center of France; Prof. Dr. Dieter Fensel, from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of Leopold-Franzens University, Innsbruck, Austria; Prof Dr. Gloria Corpas Pastor from the University of Malaga, Spain; and the doctors Iñaki Alegria, Xabier Arregi and Xabier Artola, from the IXA Group of the Basque Country University.




Fixed Expressions


Book Description

This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically, genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions, at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use, and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness, the emergence of fixed expressions, their connection to social action, the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness, crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions, as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of ‘units’ of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic, realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data, mostly everyday conversation, in English, Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin, with some crosslinguistic comparison.




Expressing the Self


Book Description

This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families, including Amharic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish, Tariana (Arawak), and Thai. In the domain of speaking about oneself, languages use a myriad of expressions that cut across grammatical and semantic categories, as well as a wide variety of constructions. Languages of Southeast and East Asia famously employ a great number of terms for first person reference to signal honorification. The number and mixed properties of these terms make them debatable candidates for pronounhood, with many grammar-driven classifications opting to classify them with nouns. Some languages make use of egophors or logophors, and many exhibit an interaction between expressing the self and expressing evidentiality qua the epistemic status of information held from the ego perspective. The volume's focus on expressing the self, however, is not directly motivated by an interest in the grammar or lexicon, but instead stems from philosophical discussions on the special status of thoughts about oneself, known as de se thoughts. It is this interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that underlies this volume, comprising philosophy of mind at one end of the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at the other. This unprecedented juxtaposition results in a novel method of approaching de se and de se expressions, in which research methods from linguistics and philosophy inform each other. The importance of this interdisciplinary perspective on expressing the self cannot be overemphasized. Crucially, the volume also demonstrates that linguistic research on first-person reference makes a valuable contribution to research on the self tout court, by exploring the ways in which the self is expressed, and thereby adding to the insights gained through philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.




Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories


Book Description

From the refinement of general methodology, to new insights of synchronic and diachronic universals, to studies of specific phenomena, this collection demonstrates the crucial role that language data play in the evolution of useful, accurate linguistic theories. Issues addressed include the determination of meaning in typological studies; a refined understanding of diachronic processes by including intentional, social, statistical, and level-determined phenomena; the reconsideration of categories such as sentence, evidential or adposition, and structures such as compounds or polysynthesis; the tension between formal simplicity and functional clarity; the inclusion of unusual systems in theoretical debates; and fresh approaches to Chinese classifiers, possession in Oceanic languages, and English aspect. This is a careful selection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories in Boulder, Colorado. The purpose of the Symposium was to confront fundamental issues in language structure and change with the rich variation of forms and functions observed across languages.