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This book examines the syntax of Japanese in comparison with other Asian languages within the Principles-and-Parameters framework. It grows out of a collaborative research project on comparative syntax pursued at the Center for Linguistics at Nanzan University from 2008-2013, in collaboration with researchers at Tsing Hua (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Connecticut, EFL U. (Hyderabad, India), Siena, and Cambridge. In ten chapters, the book compares the syntax of Japanese to that of Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Hindi, and Malayalam, focusing on ellipsis, movement, and Case. The first three chapters compare nominal structures in Japanese and Chinese and account for the differences between them. An important point of comparison in these chapters is the patterns of N'-ellipsis the two languages exhibit. The subsequent two chapters focus on ellipsis. One examines argument ellipsis in Japanese, Turkish, and Chinese, and argues for its correlation with the absence of
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2017, held in Hatfield, UK, in September 2017. The 80 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. The papers present current research in the area of computer speech processing (recognition, synthesis, understanding etc.) and related domains (including signal processing, language and text processing, computational paralinguistics, multi-modal speech processing, human-computer interaction).
Numeral Classifier Systems considers the functional significance of the Japanese numeral system, its conclusions based on a corpus of 500 uses of classifier constructions drawn from oral and written Japanese texts. Interestingly, although the Japanese system appears to conform at least superficially to universalistic predictions about its semantic structure, this study reports that in actual usage, the semantic role of classifiers is slight — only very rarely do they carry any lexical information unavailable from the context or the noun with which the classifier occurs. It does appear, however, that the system has an important role to play in providing pronoun-like anaphoric elements and in marking pragmatic distinctions such as the individuatedness of referents and the newness of numerical information. For these reasons, the classifier system is deeply involved in a number of subsystems of Japanese grammar, and the demise of the system (sometimes rumored to be impending) would have substantial implications for the structure of the language as a whole.
The studies of the Japanese language and psycholinguistics have advanced quite significantly in the last half century thanks to the progress in the study of cognition and brain mechanisms associated with language acquisition, use, and disorders, and in particular, because of technological developments in experimental techniques employed in psycholinguistic studies. This volume contains 18 chapters that discuss our brain functions, specifically, the process of Japanese language acquisition - how we acquire/learn the Japanese language as a first/second language - and the mechanism of Japanese language perception and production - how we comprehend/produce the Japanese language. In turn we addre...
Explore the exciting research where semantics meets morphology, syntax and pragmatics. In this book, leading researchers use in-depth articles to explain a wide range of topics at these interfaces, including the semantics of intonation, inflection, compounding, argument structure, type shifting, compositionality, implicature, context dependence, deixis and presupposition. Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the highly cited material in this book is an ideal starting point for anyone interested in semantics where it crosses over with other dimensions of grammar.
This book explores recurring topics in Romance phonetics and phonology. Topics studied range from the low-level mechanical processes involved in speech production and perception to high-level representation and computation, based on data from across the Romance language family, including from varieties that are less widely studied.
These conference proceedings examine various aspects of formal linguistics. Individual topics covered include: sequences of tense, intentionality and scope; empty consonants and direct prosody; syllable weight and quantity in Dutch; finite control on modern Persian; and copular sentences.
Focusing mainly on classifiers, Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages offers a deep investigation of three major classifier languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This book provides detailed discussions well supported by empirical evidence and corpus analyses. Theoretical hypotheses regarding differences and commonalities between numeral classifier languages and other mainly article languages are tested to seek universals or typological characteristics. The essays collected here from leading scholars in different fields promise to be greatly significant in the field of linguistics for several reasons. First, it targets three representative classifier languages in Asia. It also provides critical clues and suggests solutions to syntactic, semantic, psychological, and philosophical issues about classifier constructions. Finally, it addresses ensuing debates that may arise in the field of linguistics in general and neighboring inter-disciplinary areas. This book should be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of East Asian languages.
This monograph addresses fundamental syntactic issues of classifier constructions, based on a thorough study of a typical classifier language, Mandarin Chinese. It shows that the contrast between count and mass is not binary. Instead, there are two independently attested features: Numerability, the ability of a noun to combine with a numeral directly, and Delimitability, the ability of a noun to be modified by a delimitive modifier, such as size, shape, or boundary modifier. Although all nouns in Chinese are non-count nouns, there is still a mass/non-mass contrast, with mass nouns selected by individuating classifiers and non-mass nouns selected by individual classifiers. Some languages have...