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This study aims to compare students’ Japanese language grammar ability, between students who practice with a chatbot-based application (Gengobot) with students who do not use the application. This research was conducted using quantitative experimental research methods, with experimental class and control class. The subjects of this research were 22 Japanese language students. The results showed that the grammar ability of students who used Gengobot application as a training medium improved significantly than students who used conventional media as paper works. Factors that cause these differences are the use of cognitive and behavioristic approaches in applications, as well as the use of media, which is more practical and engaging. The questionnaire regarding student responses to the Gengobot application shows positive results. Things that need to be considered in future research are the development of the Gengobot application to be more flexible and to add more material to the application.

The objective of this research is to observe the advantages and disadvantages of Basic Japanese online learning through Skype and Zoom application. The range of age of the participants of the research is from twenty to thirty years old. The method applied in this is descriptive qualitative research. The source of the data for the research is the observational data from 5 participants who are basic Japanese learners. The data are in the form of pre-test, post-test, and respond from the participants. The descriptive analysis will be done to describe the result of the pre-test, post-test, and respond from the participant. The result of the analysis indicates that online learning medium can be effectively done for grammar and conversation learning. The advantage of the online media learning webinar, such as Skype and Zoom, is its capability to make the participants are able to interact written and orally and to share presentation screen through sharing display feature. Since one of the most crucial factors of online learning is internet, Zoom is more recommended compare to Skype. The observation shows that Skype is often disconnected in the middle of learning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most people agree that tongue-twister (TT) sentences (i.e., sentences that contain the same consonants repeated) are difficult to read orally. What about silent reading? If the same difficulty is found during the silent reading of Japanese sentences, what is the implication for our understanding of the psycholinguistic nature of the Japanese script, particularly kanji? This paper attempts to answer that question by providing and explaining data that showed strong TT effects in both silent and oral reading of Japanese sentences, particularly on alveolar fricatives and bilabial stops and fricatives. The paper also suggests possible future studies and discusses pedagogical implications for reading Japanese as a second or foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper concerns the grammar of clause combining in Finnish and Japanese conversation. We consider the patterns of clause combining in our data and focus on the verbal and non-verbal cues which allow participants to determine whether, after the end of a clause-sized unit, the turn will end or continue with another clause-sized unit, resulting in a clause combination. We conclude that morphosyntax alone cannot account for the patterns found in our data, but that the participants orient to, at least, prosodic and nonverbal cues in determining the boundaries of clauses and projecting continuation in the form of another clause. Also important for projection are fixed expressions or 'prefabs'. In addition, semantic and pragmatic factors play a role. In that sense, we explore the question of where the limits of grammar for interaction, understood as the knowledge which speakers share and which forms the basis for the creation and processing of novel utterances, should be drawn, and whether grammar should include, beyond morphosyntax, not only prosodic, pragmatic and semantic features but also bodily behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, variation has received a lot of attention in mainstream generative phonology, and several different models have been developed to account for variable phonological phenomena. However, all existing generative models of phonological variation account for the overall rate at which some process applies in a corpus, and therefore implicitly assume that all words are affected equally by a variable process. In this paper, we show that this is not the case. Many variable phenomena are more likely to apply to frequent than to infrequent words. A model that accounts perfectly for the overall rate of application of some variable process therefore does not necessarily account very well for the actual application of the process to individual words. We illustrate this with two examples, English t/d-deletion and Japanese geminate devoicing. We then augment one existing generative model (noisy Harmonic Grammar) to incorporate the contribution of usage frequency to the application of variable processes. In this model, the influence of frequency is incorporated by scaling the weights of faithfulness constraints up or down for words of different frequencies. This augmented model accounts significantly better for variation than existing generative models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages affixes can assign accents on roots to which they attach. Some previous studies have claimed that accents assigned by affixes universally fall on syllables next to the affixes (Kurisu ; Revithiadou ). Kawahara and Wolf () document a newly-coined suffix which counterexemplifies this generalization: the new Japanese suffix [-zu] assigns an accent on root-initial syllables. This paper reports five experiments that test the productivity of non-local accentuation of this suffix. The first three experiments show that given four-mora roots, Japanese speakers prefer initial accents in zu-words to those in monomorphemic words. However, when zu-words are derived from four-mora long roots, speakers prefer default antepenultimate accentuation to initial accentuation. The last two experiments using shorter roots show that speakers assign initial accents to zu-words more often when derived from shorter roots. Overall, the experiments support the initial accenting behavior of [-zu], contributing to the typology of affix-controlled accentuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the development of interactional competence () by English-speaking learners of Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) in a study abroad setting, as indexed by their use of the interactionally significant particle ' ne.' The analysis is based on a comparison of (a) 6 sets of conversations between JFL learners and native Japanese peers during the first week of the study abroad program, and (b) 6 sets of conversations between the same pairs of speakers during the fifth week of the program. Although there is great variability in efficiency of interactional competence acquisition among JFL cohorts, JFL learners on the whole seem to have enhanced their interactional competence by using more ' ne' alignments. This study supports the argument that a study abroad program provides a valuable developmental experience that can accelerate JFL learners' acquisition of interactional competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An expanding body of research in linguistics deals with discourse markers (DMs), the expressions that have emotive rather than referential functions (Holker, 1991). Taking a discourse-pragmatic approach, this study examines the usages of the Japanese DM ano and the Mandarin Chinese DM nage in conversational discourse, both of which are derived from demonstrative adjectives, equivalent to "that" in English. Through investigating 302 cases of ano and 252 cases of nage in natural conversations, this study argues, neither ano nor nage merely serves as a verbal "filler" in utterances; rather, each carries similar multiple discourse-pragmatic functions in various social contexts, which include 1) to introduce a new referent/topic in a highlighted while less imposing way; 2) to mitigate various Face Threatening Acts; and, 3) to indicate the speaker's hesitancy in sharing certain personal information. This study claims that the DMs ano and nage are politeness markers (Brown & Levinson, 1987) as well as modality markers (Maynard, 1992), and such usages are derived from their original forms as demonstrative adjectives, which reflect a close relationship between physical and psychological distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes ongoing efforts to provide software infrastructure (and methodology) for open-source machine translation that combines a deep semantic transfer approach with advanced stochastic models. The resulting infrastructure combines precise grammars for parsing and generation, a semantic-transfer based translation engine and stochastic controllers. We provide both a qualitative and quantitative experience report from instantiating our general architecture for Japanese-English MT using only open-source components, including HPSG-based grammars of English and Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation of Japanese temporal clauses depends on an intricate interplay between a number of factors including, in addition to the temporal connective, the tense and aspectual properties of the embedded clause as well as the matrix clause. This paper presents a detailed survey of these interactions and a model-theoretic compositional analysis which improves significantly over previous proposals in terms of attention to empirical detail and internal simplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines two commonly-used Japanese verbs of cognition, WAKARU and SHIRU, in naturally occurring conversation, and demonstrates that these verbs are expressions of position and attitude that are relevant both to individual speakers (i.e., subjective uses) and to relational activities among participants (i.e., intersubjective uses). My naturally occurring conversation data supports Lee (2006) that there seems to be a general principle that speakers' lexical choices are governed by information type, but the link between speakers' lexical choices and information type is not so absolute but fluid. In fact, while 24% of my data are those where only WAKARU is expected to be used or only SHIRU is expected to be used, 74% are those in which both WAKARU and SHIRU are possible regardless of information type. A closer analysis of such 'fluid' examples suggests that speakers choose one expression over another to express their personal attitudes and emotions toward the content of information and toward the other conversation participants. More specifically, their choice for WAKARU manifests such features as experiencer perspective and speaker empathy, and in contrast, their choice for SHIRU is characterized as observer perspective. The study is firmly in keeping with a usage-based perspective on language (e.g., Barlow and Kemmer 2000; Bybee 2006), which takes as its starting point the idea that language use shapes language form and meaning, and offers new insights into the interactional and performative nature of language by addressing the two commonly used verbs of cognition in Japanese conversation from a viewpoint of discourse pragmatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the Japanese sentence-final particles ne and yo as they occur in soliloquy. Because of their pivotal roles in spoken Japanese, these particles have been investigated extensively for decades. However, most previous works have analyzed them solely in terms of communication, invariably assuming the presence of an addressee. In fact, it is not yet widely known that these particles can also occur in soliloquy in which communication with another person is not intended. The present article is the first study to address the significance of ne and yo as they occur in soliloquy and discuss problems associated with hitherto proposed analyses. In order to investigate how communicative and non-communicative intentions influence utterances, an experiment was conducted in which soliloquies of native speakers of Japanese were examined. For ne, this study endorses Takubo and Kinsui's Discourse Management Model. For yo, Inoue's account is vindicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper tries to present a native grammarian’s view of Japanese, articulated in opposition to the analysis of the language based on the notions of ‘Western linguistics’ such as ‘subject’ and ‘tense’. Although Yamaguchi’s particular analysis, provided in section 2, is not shared by all native grammarians of Japanese, it does give an illustrative example of the perspectival stance, or ‘footing’, of a dominant school of National Language Studies (koku-go-gaku), of which Yamaguchi is a leading figure, towards language and culture. This ‘footing’, as seen in section 2, is characterized by its focus on ‘emic analysis’ and its espousal of nativism, which may be associated with nationalistic essentialism. As such, it gives us an opportunity to observe not only a different grammatical tradition, but also the irreducibly cultural, i.e., (social) pragmatic, dimension of grammatical (and pragmatic) analysis, centrally concerned with the (cross/sub)national identities and (cross/sub)disciplinary perspectives of grammarians, linguistics, and pragmaticists, as briefly suggested in section 1. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

It has been widely assumed since Kitagawa and Ross (Linguist Anal 9: 19–53, 1982) that noun phrases in Chinese and Japanese are quite similar in structure. They are N-final in surface word order, they employ “modifying markers” ( de in Chinese and no in Japanese) extensively, and they require classifiers for numeral expressions. In this paper, we argue that, contrary to appearance, they have quite distinct structures. We examine N'-ellipsis in the two languages and present supporting evidence for the hypothesis argued for by Simpson (in: Tang and Liu (eds.) On the formal way to Chinese languages, 2003), among others, that Chinese noun phrases are head-initial. According to this hypothesis, de is D, and a classifier heads another projection within DP. Japanese noun phrases, on the other hand, are head-final. No is a contextual Case marker, as proposed by Kitagawa and Ross (Linguist Anal 9: 19–53, 1982), and classifier phrases are adjuncts modifying nominal projections. Our discussion shows that Kayne’s (The antisymmetry of syntax, 1994) analysis of N-final relatives applies elegantly to Chinese but not to Japanese. It thus suggests that Japanese relative clauses are head-final throughout the derivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the profound effect of translator Futabatei Shimei's -ta form on the development of die reine Sprache, also known as pure language and is considered as one of Japan's literary language. The article will have a close examination of Shimei's use of -ta as a past tense and aspectual marker. According to author and translator Karatani Kojin, Shimei's translations from works by Turgenev conformed to an extremely "literal" method and made such a strong impression on young writers of the naturalist school that they completely determined the direction of modern Japanese literature.

The article focuses on the vagueness in the expression of the verb, tari suru, which means "doing things like" in the English language, in modern Japanese language. The article will also mention the history of -tari, the conventional usage of the verb, tari suru construction and its primary function, and report various descriptions given of the newer usage of the construction. The author argues that the newer usage of verb-tari suru is related to other usages of the construction and that the sense of lack of specification is responsible for various connotations associated with the expression.

The present study conducted four experiments to investigate how modality information provided through the sentence-final particles -yo and -ne were utilized in identifying an empty subject by native Japanese speakers. Experiment 1 conducted a whole-sentence anomaly decision task, finding that base sentences without -yo and -ne attached were processed more quickly than sentences with either -yo or -ne and that sentences with -yo were processed more quickly than the same sentences with -ne. A delay in processing sentences with -ne was created by the ambiguity of an empty subject identified by -ne as either ‘I’ or ‘you’. In Experiment 2, the auxiliary verb -ou ‘let us’ was added to the base sentence before -yo and -ne, providing a cue to identify the empty subject as ‘we’. Although the base sentences were processed more quickly than those containing the particles -yo and -ne, no other difference resulted from the attachment of these particles. To eliminate the possibility of orthographic-length effects, Experiment 3 compared base sentences with -ou, -ou-yo, and -ou-ne, finding no difference among them (i.e., no ortho- graphic-length effects). Experiment 4 was conducted to further eliminate the possible involvement of discourse-level computation by utilizing base sentences with overt subjects, past tense verbs, and the auxiliary verb -rasii ‘appear to’. Once subjects of sentences were clearly shown, there was no difference among base sentences and those with either -yo or -ne attached (i.e., no discourse-level computation effects). Thus the present study proved that the modality information inherent in the particles -yo and -ne was used for identifying empty subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs conversation analysis to investigate the role of adverbials in Japanese talk-in-interaction for the projection of further talk and some implications this has for interactional styles. Through examination of naturally occurring talk, it is first observed that a typical usage of adverbials is in some position preceding the predicate, although they are also appended as post-predicate additions. Second, when adverbials are produced prior to a predicate, evidently they can strongly project a forthcoming predicate within the particular interactional context. Given the importance of predicates within Japanese turns, adverbials have a major part to play, not only in assisting participants to foreshadow a probable unfolding of an utterance, but also to enable recipients to achieve early alignment with emerging talk and to expedite the implementation of subsequent actions. These features are shown to be a powerful resource in the facilitation of seemingly implicit styles of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the syntax and LF properties of 'Multiple Sluicing' in Japanese. Built on the LF-Copying analysis, we examine the condition imposed on the elements figuring in the IP-Copying site, and show the relevance of the functional interpretation of wh phrases. We also look at some quantificational properties of multiple wh questions. Finally, the possibility of 'Multiple Sluicing' in English is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a formal semantic account of the ambiguity associated with the -te iru construction in Japanese. This construction is known to receive at least two distinct interpretations: on-going process interpretations analogous to the English progressive and so-called resultative interpretations. The latter are sub-classified by some researchers into concrete result state readings and experiential state readings. Based upon the distributional properties of adverbials, we suggest that progressive interpretations of DURATIVE VERBS and concrete result state interpretations of INTANTANEOUS VERBS should be grouped together, as opposed to experiential readings of DURATIVE or INTANTANEOUS VERBS. To account for the distinction between these two types of interpretation, the proposed system analyzes the -te iru form into the morpheme -te, which is claimed to bear a perfect feature, and the aspectual auxiliary iru. Our proposal for the aspectual auxiliary iru is an extension of Landman's (1992) proposal and offers a unified account of the multiple interpretations of -te iru on the basis of a new analysis of INTANTANEOUS VERBS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]