16.2313, Review: Discourse/East Asian Lang: Fry (2003)

Tue Aug 2 21:19:52 UTC 2005

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2313. Tue Aug 02 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2313, Review: Discourse/East Asian Lang: Fry (2003)

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1)
Date: 02-Aug-2005
From: Robert Albon < rob at albon.us >
Subject: Ellipsis and wa-marking in Japanese Conversation 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 17:12:23
From: Robert Albon < rob at albon.us >
Subject: Ellipsis and wa-marking in Japanese Conversation 

AUTHOR: Fry, John 
TITLE: Ellipsis and wa-marking in Japanese Conversation
SERIES: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Routledge
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1106.html 

Robert C. Albon, unaffiliated scholar

INTRODUCTION

This book is of interest to students of linguistics and all others who 
work with Japanese natural language as well as to researchers who 
work with speech corpora in other languages.

It is divided into three parts and six chapters: Ch. 1 Introduction (pp 1-
6), Part I The CallHome Japanese (CHJ) corpus (pp 7-76), Ch. 2 
Corpora and conversation (pp 7-26), Ch. 3 The CHJ corpus (pp 27-
36), Ch. 4 Annotating the CHJ corpus (pp 37-76), Part II Ellipsis and 
wa-marking (pp 77-168), Ch. 5 Ellipsis (pp 79-120), Ch. 6 Wa-marking 
(pp 121-168), Part III Appendices (pp 169-182), and bibliography (pp 
183-198) and indexes (pp 183-204).

Fry's blurb written for Routledge reads: "Fry demonstrates that 
Japanese conversation obeys certain principles of argument ellipsis 
that appear to be language universal: namely, the tendency to omit 
transitive and human subjects and the tendency to express at most 
one argument per clause. He identifies a set of syntactic and semantic 
factors that correlate significantly with the ellipsis of grammatical 
particles following a noun phrase. These factors include the 
grammatical construction type (question, idiom), length of the noun 
phrase (NP), utterance length, proximity of the NP to the predicate, 
and the animacy and definiteness of the NP. The animacy and 
definiteness constrains are of particular interest because these too 
seem to reflect language-universal principles."

EVALUATION

On John Fry's website (johnfry.org), he says "[a] book must exhibit not 
only outstanding scholarship, but also be a pleasure to read... the 
second criterion seems to be harder to meet." In my opinion, Ellipsis 
and wa-marking in Japanese Conversation meets both criteria with 
flying colors, and has certainly earned its place in Routledge's 
Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series.

I found only one typographical error in the English text, although there 
were a few more in the Japanese text (nanika "something" on pp 32, 
52, 58, and 59 should be nanka, burukkrin "Brooklyn" on pg 53 should 
be burukkurin). As you can see from the six page introduction, F has 
done an excellent job paring away the literature review and other 
dissertatorial fat. He kept the meat accessible to as wide an audience 
as possible, providing introductory material on natural language in Ch. 
2, information on corpus linguistics research for specialists in Ch. 4, 
and information on the Japanese language in the appendices, 
allowing readers to skip sections they are not interested in, but 
insuring that no reader is left behind.

As indicated in the title, F uses natural language data to investigate 
ellipsis and wa-marking. F distinguishes systematic data, such as 
corpus or elicited data, from nonsystematic data, such as introspective 
or anecdotal data. F says that elicited, introspective, and anecdotal 
data may be useful for identifying linguistic phenomena and 
formulating hypotheses, but corpus data is unique in its ability to 
objectively and quantitatively measure linguistic phenomenon (p. 12).

The merits of corpus data are indisputable in the abstract, but any 
data is only as good as the people who collected it. In Ch. 3, we see 
some specific problems with the CHJ, such as the paucity of the 
demographic information that was collected from participants. Far too 
often, basic information such as age, education, and the dialect 
spoken by participants is missing. In some cases, native speakers 
employed by the University of Pennsylvania to transcribe the CHJ 
made "judgments", as F politely puts it, as to the dialect spoken by a 
participant. I believe "guess" would be a more accurate description 
here. Obviously, no single Japanese native speaker can be a native 
speaker of all Japanese dialects, and it seems that none of the CHJ 
transcribers were native speakers of any of the Kyushu dialects, nor 
were any of F's assistants. It seems F's Figure 3.3 (p. 30) may have 
accidentally inflated the Kansai numbers at the expense of Kyushu 
numbers, and Table A.3 on (p. 181) may include some dialect 
particles, such as male wa and kashira, which F counts as standard 
Japanese particles, inflating those numbers. However, for the most 
part F handled dialect as best as he could -- carefully citing sources 
and in some cases excluding dialect data. It is probably safe to say 
that these items had little effect on F's discussion of ellipsis and wa-
marking. 

In Ch. 4, F discusses how he annotated the CHJ corpus to allow 
automatic processing. F advises "[r]eaders whose eyes glaze over at 
the fine[r] details of corpus annotation" to skim through Ch. 4. If you 
do choose to skim, be sure not to miss 4.5 Acoustic annotations (pp 
67-76). I have long been intimidated by audio data, but F has cured 
me of that. F gives an excellent description of how to use the 
computer to measure audio files and how to use those measurements 
in quantitative research. If you have not worked with audio files 
before, this is a very painless introduction to the subject that will 
benefit you greatly.

F's claim that ellipsis in Japanese appears to follow language 
universals has potentially exciting ramifications for those working with 
gender language, an area where many feel that Japanese differs 
markedly from universals. F notes in 5.4.2 Sex and dialect (pp 101-
104) that the CHJ data does not support any "categorical 
generalization about the effect of speaker sex on ellipsis in 
Japanese". F is very polite, but, reading between the lines, I believe 
that he is refuting Shibamoto's (S) claim that "male speakers are found 
to retain particles with much greater frequency than female speakers" 
(Shibamoto, 1985, as quoted by F). F suggests that S's use of elicited 
data and her small sample size may have been problematic.

S was the first person to write on ellipsis in Japanese women's speech 
in English, and is still widely cited on that subject today (Tanaka, 
2004: 96). Naturally, she has been quite influential, and her work is 
seen as "statistical" (Tsujimura, 1996: 377-9). Nonetheless, I strongly 
agree with F's comments above, and I feel that as more researchers 
use corpus data for quantitative research in to Japanese women's 
language, we will find that many of the features of women's Japanese 
described by S are perhaps not as marked as she suggests. However, 
gender was not F's main theme, sometimes his description of gender 
items, such as counts of female particles in Table A.3, must be taken 
with a grain of salt. Fortunately, Table A.3 is provided as background 
information in the appendix, and does not detract from F's primary 
conclusions.

I heartily recommend this book. F writes well and does a great job 
making what could be a dry read engaging. His is an excellent model 
to follow for anyone interested in working with corpus data. I am sure 
you will find this book especially useful if you want to work with audio 
corpus data. F is soon to publish an annotated CHJ corpus, which will 
make the CHJ data even more accessible. In addition to his findings 
on wa-marking and ellipsis, F uncovered what I felt were some very 
exciting finds in Japanese gender language, and has shown the 
potential and some difficulties of using CHJ data for dialect research. 
As with all good research, he carefully limited his scope, to ellipsis and 
wa-marking, and has left the books on gender and dialect for 
someone else to write. 

REFERENCES

Shibamoto, Janet (1985). Japanese Women's Language. New York: 
Academic Press. (As quoted in F, Tsujimura (1996) and Tanaka 
(2004)) 

Tanaka, Lidia (2004). Gender, Language and Culture: A study of 
Japanese television interview discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Tsujimura, Natsuko (1996). An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. 
Malden MA: Blackwell. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Robert C. Albon graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison 
in 1995. He has been a freelance translator since 1992 (Japanese to 
English, Chinese to English, French to English, Creole to English) and 
was an official Japanese interpreter at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. 
He currently lives in Zama City, Japan. His research interests include 
informal language and dialects of Japanese, Chinese and French. 
Homepage: http://www.albon.us.

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