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This study draws on video recordings of 12 massage therapy sessions that took place in Japan. During massage therapy sessions, therapists produce utterances regarding massaging procedures. This study investigates the ways such procedural utterances are syntactically constructed in different sequential contexts and bodily configurations. The procedural utterances take three forms: the request form, the proposal form, and the announcement form. Two observations have been made. First, various movements, including the movements that are mentioned in the procedural utterances, are initiated during the utterances. Second, the placement of the different syntactic forms of procedural utterances varies relative to the stage of the ongoing therapy session and the concurrent body movement. I argue that procedural utterances are constructed normatively sensitively to the tactile orientations that accompany bodily manipulations and that this normative sensitivity can be a resource for the negotiation between the therapist and the client regarding the incipient procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers basic observations about wh-questions in JSL with clause-final wh-signs, i.e., wh-finals. Basic word order of matrix wh-sentences in Japanese Sign Language (JSL) have been reported by previous studies such as Morgan (2006), Fischer and Gong (2010), Kimura (2011), and Akahori and Oka (2011), among others, which reported that wh-signs can appear in the clause-final position in addition to clause-initial and in-situ positions. In order to investigate the syntactic mechanism of JSL wh-constructions, it is also necessary to confirm basic syntactic properties of wh-signs in embedded clauses. However, distributions of wh-signs in embedded clauses have not been fully investigated in previous studies. Based on the discussion on the word order of sentences with direct and indirect speech in JSL in Uchibori et al. (2011), this paper demonstrates that wh-signs occur in embedded clauses that are not instances of direct speech (or quotations) of wh-questions, but those of syntactically embedded indirect speech. In embedded clauses, wh-finals appear as in the matrix wh-questions. Relevant theoretical issues are discussed concerning the relation between linear properties (i.e., distributions of wh-expressions) and the structural properties of natural language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents empirical evidence of the high referential specificity of sound-symbolic words, based on a FrameNet-aided analysis of collocational data of Japanese mimetics. The definition of mimetics, particularly their semantic definition, has been crosslinguistically the most challenging problem in the literature, and different researchers have used different adjectives (most notably, 'vivid,' since Doke 1935) to describe their semantic peculiarity. The present study approaches this longstanding issue from a frame-semantic point of view combined with a quantitative method. It was found that mimetic manner adverbials generally form a frame-semantically restricted range of verbal/nominal collocations than non-mimetic ones. Each mimetic can thus be considered to evoke a highly specific frame, which elaborates the general frame evoked by its typical host predicate and contains a highly limited set of frame elements, which correlate and constrain one another. This conclusion serves as a unified account of previously reported phenomena concerning mimetics, including the lack of hyponymy, the one-mimetic-per-clause restriction, and unparaphrasability. This study can be also viewed as a methodological proposal for the measurement of frame specificity, which supplements bottom-up linguistic tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce novel paraphrasing rules for Japanese light verb constructions (LVCs) that reduce the differences in the surface forms while retaining several of the crucial syntactic/semantic functions of these light verbs. An analysis of the linguistic properties of light verbs allows us to create paraphrasing patterns that map 151 different light verbs into 10 simple forms. Of these 10 forms, 7 convert complex noun-particle-verb structures into simple predicative forms. By constructing a list of 923 examples for ambiguous light verbs, we show that we can correctly distinguish real LVCs from those in which the light verbs were actually functioning as a main verb. The results of experiments indicate that our paraphrasing rules offer high accuracy. The experiments also reveal that our paraphrasing system works as a normalizer of complex predicates, which improves the recall rate of the predicate extraction task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I intend to shed light on the fact that Japanese exclamatives, unlike their English counterparts, may not be embedded under factive verbs but instead may be embedded under a set of assertive predicates such as say and think (first observed in Ono 2006 ). I argue that this contrast is attributed to the interrogative and declarative syntax that English and Japanese exclamatives have, respectively. In order to account for the selection of predicates that may embed Japanese exclamatives, I further argue for a cartographic approach based on Rizzi’s (1997) and Haegeman’s (2006) left periphery structures and following Ono (2006) , namely that Japanese exclamatives always contain MoodP, which allows only a subset of assertive matrix predicates to embed exclamatives given its position above TopicP and FocusP in the hierarchy. Another observation made in the paper is that the subject DP in Japanese exclamatives is obligatorily either aboutness topicalized or exhaustive listing focalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the data regarding the focusing of the particle dake ‘only’, this article shows that in Japanese, wa-marked topic phrases are placed in the CP domain, and argues that this can take place either in overt constituent structure or in LF. Other ordinary phrases – including ga-marked major subjects that are sometimes assumed to reside in the same clause-peripheral position as topics – are shown to be located within TP. It is also argued that Japanese shows no evidence for “overt” wh-movement, despite Takahashi's claim (Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11: 655–678, 1993, Journal of East Asian Linguistics 3: 265–300, 1994) to the contrary. The discussion suggests that the prominent use of the CP domain is subject to typological variation, and that Japanese, unlike English, is a topic-prominent language, in which a topic is placed in the CP domain – i.e., TopP located above TP – by the LF output in order to form a topic-comment structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the ways in which speakers syntactically link the whole or part of their utterance to a preceding utterance of their own or of another participant in conversations through 'syntactic nesting.' I define 'syntactic nesting' as a discourse strategy that syntactically links the whole or part of an utterance with a preceding utterance in such a way that it fits as its constituent. In this study, using data from videotaped natural and spontaneous face-to-face conversations between native speakers of Japanese, I examine how speakers use syntactic nesting as a tying discourse device, focusing on their use of case particles that follow the noun and on their use of the repetition of preceding utterances. There have been various studies analyzing how speakers in Japanese discourse link their utterances to preceding utterances through different strategies: non-finite verb forms (Iwasaki 2002); postposing and increment (Kuno 1978, Hinds 1982, Maynard 1989, Shibatani 1990, Ono and Suzuki 1992, Koike 2003); co-construction (Akatsuka 1997, Hayashi and Mori 1998, Hayashi 2003). Building on these previous studies, I demonstrate how participants in Japanese conversation construct utterances in such a way that they syntactically weave their utterances into prior utterances exploiting case particles in syntactic nesting. Although zero-marking of parts in utterances is pervasive in Japanese conversations (Hudson, Sakakibara, and Kondo 2006), I argue that participants explicitly mark parts of utterances with case particles to create a clear link between the host and insert utterances. My research on syntactic nesting sheds light on the discourse strategies in conversations by elucidating how participants produce utterances that build on prior utterances and how they insert the whole or part of their utterances into prior utterances through syntactic devices in order to achieve mutual understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]