17.66, Review: Discourse/Syntax: Shimojo (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-66. Wed Jan 11 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.66, Review: Discourse/Syntax: Shimojo (2005)

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1)
Date: 09-Jan-2006
From: John Fry < john at johnfry.org >
Subject: Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:23:35
From: John Fry < john at johnfry.org >
Subject: Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation 
 

AUTHOR: Shimojo, Mitsuaki 
TITLE: Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1653.html 

John Fry, SRI International

Linguists with even the most cursory acquaintance with the Japanese 
language are likely aware that it encodes grammatical and pragmatic 
features using postpositional particles, for example '-wa' (topic 
particle) and '-ga' (subject particle).  A vast literature in Japanese 
linguistics attempts to explain the nuances conveyed by these 
particles, often by contrasting minimal pairs like 'hi-ga noboru' ('the 
sun rises') and 'hi-wa noboru' ('the sun, it rises').  The question is 
often put this way: when does a speaker choose '-ga' instead of '-wa', 
and vice-versa?

A welcome and insightful addition to this literature is Mitsuaki 
Shimojo's _Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation_.  Relying 
on quantitative and qualitative analyses of spontaneous Japanese 
conversations, Shimojo develops an account of how Japanese 
speakers encode subject and object arguments using a variety of 
grammatical strategies, among them wa- and ga-marking.  Shimojo 
explains the speaker's choice of encoding strategies in terms of 
discourse salience and ''mental processing instructions'' in the tradition 
of Talmy Givon (1983, 1993).

The book consists of three introductory chapters, followed by five 
chapters that detail Shimojo's analyses and results.

Chapter 1, the introduction, delineates the scope of the investigation.  
Shimojo restricts his attention to the core argument roles of subject 
and direct object; peripheral argument roles such as locatives and 
indirect objects are ignored.  Next, Shimojo identifies six ''encoding 
types'' to be investigated; that is, six ways that the subject and object 
arguments can be manifested in actual Japanese utterances.  The six 
encoding types are: (1) ga-marking; (2) o-marking; (3) wa-marking; (4) 
zero anaphor (i.e., argument ellipsis); (5) zero particle (i.e., particle 
ellipsis); and (6) post-predicative encoding (postposing).

Chapter 2 is a comprehensive yet engaging review of the previous 
literature on the six encoding types.  Most earlier studies (e.g. Fry 
2003) focused on the grammatical or discourse properties of just one 
encoding type, such as wa-marking or ellipsis, in isolation.  By 
examining all six encoding types within the same conversational 
corpus, Shimojo hopes to develop a more coherent, integrated 
account than the ones he reviews in this chapter.

Chapter 3 describes the conversational Japanese data on which the 
book's analyses are based.  Following the methods of Maynard 
(1989), Shimojo recorded, videotaped, and transcribed the 
spontaneous conversations of eight pairs of native Japanese 
speakers.  The resulting four hours of conversational data yielded a 
total of 7909 ''clausal units''.  This chapter also describes how subjects 
and objects were identified within the conversational transcripts.  One 
question this chapter does not answer is why Shimojo went to the 
trouble of creating and transcribing a brand new set of Japanese 
conversations in support of his research.  Were no existing 
conversational data appropriate (for example, the transcribed 
Japanese conversations available from the Linguistic Data 
Consortium)?  Also unclear is why the conversations needed to be 
videotaped.

Chapters 4 and 5 are concerned with discourse salience.  Following 
Givon (1983), Shimojo adopts two quantitative measures of saliency: 
Referential Distance (the backwards distance to the most recent 
coreferential expression, measured in clausal units) and Referential 
Persistence (encompassing frequency of reference and uninterrupted 
persistence, again measured in clausal units).  These chapters, 
stuffed full of tables and statistical results, are a bit tedious to read, 
and perhaps could have been shortened.  The upshot is that the 
Referential Distance measurements show that zero anaphors tend to 
encode highly salient entities, while ga- and o-marking are associated 
with newer or less salient information.  In terms of Referential 
Persistence, wa- and o-marking is associated with highly persistent 
entities, while zero particles and the post-predicative construction are 
both associated with less persistent information, which suggests that 
these two encoding types have a defocusing function.

Chapter 6, entitled ''The Six Argument Encoding Types as a System,'' 
presents a single unified account of argument encoding in Japanese. 
The most striking feature of Shimojo's system is how he organizes the 
six encoding types into contrasting pairs.  A typical linguistic analysis 
of Japanese will contrast wa-marking with ga-marking. Shimojo, 
however, proposes that wa-marking is better contrasted with particle 
ellipsis, and that ga-marking and o-marking should be contrasted with 
argument ellipsis.  His reasoning runs roughly as follows.  First, ga-
marking, o-marking, and argument ellipsis all contribute to 'cataphoric 
focusing' (i.e., maintenance of salience), but they differ in that ellipsis 
is applied to anaphorically salient (e.g., old) information, while ga-
marking and o-marking are applied to nonsalient (e.g., new) 
information.  On the other hand, wa-marking and particle ellipsis can 
be contrasted in terms of how they are used to specify referents.  
Particle ellipsis is used for 'absolute' (i.e., non-contrastive) 
specification of an entity, whereas wa-marking encodes 
contrastiveness (and thereby helps to maintain salience). Finally, the 
post-predicative construction stands apart from the other five 
encoding types; its function, which is to defocus unimportant 
information, does not contrast directly with any of the others. Shimojo 
offers dozens of example utterances from his corpus in order to 
illustrate and support his thesis (which is one reason why this chapter 
weighs in at almost 100 pages).

The last section of Chapter 6 recasts Shimojo's system into a 
discourse processing account, whereby each encoding type 
represents a specific set of ''mental processing instructions for the 
hearer''.  For example, a zero anaphor instructs the hearer to search 
for a coreferential link and to continue the activation of the referent, 
whereas a post-predicative construction invites the hearer to 
deactivate the referent.  At a meager seven pages, this is the only 
section of the book that I wished had been longer.  How literally are 
we to interpret these ''mental processing instructions''?  What kind of 
mental discourse model is presupposed here?  Is there a relevant 
psycholinguistic literature?  This section deserves its own chapter, 
along with expanded background material and discussion.

Chapter 7 elaborates further on the Japanese post-predicative 
construction.  Accounts of this construction traditionally have been 
production-based (speaker-oriented), whereas Shimojo's account in 
Chapter 6 is comprehension-based (hearer-oriented).  Shimojo 
defends his approach by identifying flaws in the production-based 
accounts and showing that his conversational data are better 
explained in comprehension-based terms.

Final conclusions are offered Chapter 8, where Shimojo further 
develops and refines his thesis that the argument encoding system 
serves to guide the hearer's processing of utterances in spontaneous 
conversation.  Shimojo emphasizes that the speaker's choice of 
encoding type is made not in isolation, but rather in relation with other 
encoding types within the system.

In sum, Shimojo's book is an impressive example of quantitative and 
qualitative linguistic analysis of spontaneous conversation.  The 
overall thesis, that six different argument encoding types form a 
system that guides comprehension, is original, insightful, and 
empirically defensible.  While perhaps overly long, the book is 
engagingly written, with no apparent typos.  Researchers in Japanese 
linguistics, especially those interested in discourse analysis and 
processing, will want to read it.

REFERENCES

Fry, John (2003) Ellipsis and wa-marking in Japanese conversation. 
New York: Routledge.

Givon, Talmy (1983) Topic Continuity in Discourse: a quantitative 
cross-language study.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Givon, Talmy (1993) ''Coherence in Text, Coherence in Mind.'' 
Pragmatics & Cognition, 1:171-227.

Maynard, Senko K. (1989) Japanese conversation: self-
contextualization through structure and interaction management.  
Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

John Fry is a Research Linguist at SRI International in Menlo Park, 
CA, USA.





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