32.3562, Review: Japanese; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax: Nakagawa (2020)

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Subject: 32.3562, Review: Japanese; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax: Nakagawa (2020)

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Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2021 23:46:07
From: Jeff Peterson [jeffpeterson at byu.edu]
Subject: Information structure in spoken Japanese

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36726457


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-254.html

AUTHOR: Natsuko  Nakagawa
TITLE: Information structure in spoken Japanese
SUBTITLE: Particles, word order, and intonation
SERIES TITLE: Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface
PUBLISHER: Language Science Press
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Jeff Peterson, Brigham Young University

SUMMARY

“Information structure in spoken Japanese: Particles, word order, and
intonation” by Natsuko Nakagawa is the eighth volume in the series Topics at
the Grammar-Discourse Interface. This 318-page text comprising eight chapters
is intended for traditional or theoretical Japanese linguists as well as for
researchers interested in methods for investigating relationships between
information structure and linguistic forms in other languages using corpora.
The following is a summary of the book’s purpose and contents.

The main goal of “Information structure in spoken Japanese” is to investigate
the relationship between information structure and linguistic forms in spoken
Japanese. Specifically, the text explores three linguistic forms: a)
particles, b) word order, and c) intonation. The text further aims to provide
a unified account of word order and to use both topic and focus perspectives
to discuss intonation. With these goals in mind, Nakagawa aims to answer the
book’s main research question: How does language usage related to information
structure affect these three linguistic forms in Japanese?

In her book, Nakagawa provides a rigorous overview of the current state of
research on topics and foci in Japanese, as well as a deep dive into the
characteristics of spoken Japanese related to particles, word order, and
intonation. This overview provides definitions of notions associated with
topic and focus previously defined in the research, as well as Nakagawa’s
assumptions and definitions of these and other terms relevant to information
structure. Among these definitions, Nakagawa also identifies and addresses
many points of controversy among researchers in the field, as well as the
disunity of different frameworks for investigating information structure.
Topic, focus, and the characteristics of Japanese are contextualized using key
research articles by Matsushita (1928), Kuno (1972), Reinhart (1981), and
Rooth (1985), among many others. Much of what has been investigated previously
was focused on written Japanese, whereas Nakagawa explores the relation
between spoken Japanese and information structure. Nakagawa argues that
because of the points of controversy between researchers, methodological
issues in previous studies, and a focus on written Japanese, natural (spoken)
data are necessary to support previous research claims.

To shore up previous methodological issues, Nakagawa proposes an analytical
framework to conduct a unified investigation of the phenomena related to
information structure and linguistic forms in spoken Japanese. She collects
data using production experiments with Japanese native speakers and simulated
public speaking from the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. To determine the
topics and foci of the data collected, as well as other characteristics of
Japanese and their relation to information structure, she employs
acceptability and grammaticality judgments, analysis of native speaker
production based on different contexts, and corpus annotation and analysis.

In Chapter 4 Nakagawa discusses the distribution of topic markers and case
markers. Nakagawa finds that topic markers are sensitive to the given-new
taxonomy proposed by Prince (1981) and gives a detailed account of how
toiuno-wa, wa, copula followed by ga or kedo (COP-kedo/ga), and topic-coding
zero particles (Øt) code for elements within the taxonomy. In general,
toiuno-wa codes evoked elements, wa codes evoked and inferable elements,
COP-kedo/ga codes declining and unused elements, and Øt can code for any of
these elements. Based on her findings on topic particles, Nakagawa argues that
the adjacency of the elements within the taxonomy are cognitively motivated
and that this is universal. She also suggests the existence of a “strongly
evoked” status of elements, splitting the evoked category into two, which can
also be coded by toiuno-wa, wa, and Øt, as well as by zero or overt pronouns.
Regarding case markers, Nakagawa found that particles such as ga, o, and
focus-coding zero particles (Øf) are sensitive to focushood and grammatical
function. She gives a detailed analysis of the distribution of these case
particles and argues that among focus elements, patient elements are more
frequent and tend to be coded by Øf more than agent elements are.

Chapter 5 continues the discussion on information structure with a focus on
its association with word order. Nakagawa’s statistical findings indicate that
shared elements or topical NPs tend to appear clause-initially, supporting the
classic from-old-to-new principle. She finds that persistent elements (i.e.,
elements whose referent is mentioned in the following discourse) and elements
coded by topic markers are likely to appear clause-initially. However,
clause-initial topics are not always coded by topic markers and word order is
independent of topic marking. Results also show that strongly evoked topical
NPs are found post-predicatively. Nakagawa argues that because Japanese
intonation units (IUs) begin with a high F0 peak and decline toward the end,
these strongly evoked elements (with low activation cost) tend to appear
post-predicatively. She also suggests that post-predicate elements have an
interactional function similar to interactional particles like ne and sa.
Finally, Nakagawa finds that new elements or focal NPs appear immediately
before the predicate. Based on her findings and to explain why some word
orders are not acceptable, she proposes the Information-structure Continuity
Principle that suggests “elements which belong to the same [topical or focal]
unit are adjacent to each other” (p. 160) and the Persistent-element-first
Principle, which states that persistent elements come first and non-persistent
elements come last in languages with relatively free word order.

Chapter 6 focuses on the third form under consideration, i.e., intonation.
Nakagawa approaches intonation with a perspective on both topic and focus NPs.
She finds that IUs correspond to a unit of processing, the form of which is
influenced by information structure. Specifically, she finds that evoked,
inferable, declining, and unused topics are produced in separate IUs from the
predicate, whereas strongly evoked topics and foci are produced in an IU with
the predicate. Based on her findings she proposes some principles to determine
IUs, e.g., the iconic principle of intonation unit and information structure,
and the principle of intonation unit and activation cost.

Chapter 7 summarizes the studies outlined in chapters 4–6 and provides a
thought-provoking discussion of languages that grammaticalize tendencies in
the study, as well as hard and soft constraints. Chapter 8 provides concluding
thoughts, implications, and future suggestions.
  
EVALUATION

“Information structure in spoken Japanese: Particles, word order, and
intonation” provides new insights into the association of information
structure and linguistic forms. Readers with a background in Japanese
linguistics or information structure as well as those new to this field of
research will find the rigorous overview helpful in contextualizing Nakagawa’s
research questions and methods.

One reason why this book is particularly vital to the field is the lack of
research on spoken Japanese and the lack of a unified account of linguistic
forms. Most previous research has investigated information structure in
written Japanese using different frameworks. Through the examples provided by
Nakagawa, this book notes the important difference between written and spoken
Japanese and its association with information structure. The study presented
in this book benefits the field by taking advantage of speech corpora to show
evidence of the phenomena and to support the claims of previous studies, many
of which were based only on constructed examples. Nakagawa’s approach to using
data taken from corpora based on spoken Japanese, as well as using a unified
framework, helps to fill some of the gaps in the research.

Through the use of language production data, production experiments, and
sentence acceptability, this book also contributes to one of the field’s
larger goals, namely, revealing how cognition is reflected in human language
in general. Nakagawa provides many insightful findings to her studies,
including those on topic markers and case markers. Using her personal
intuition, Nakagawa also provides an interesting analysis of topic markers and
proposes a hierarchy for topic coding. Along with giving the results of the
study, Nakagawa walks the reader through explanations of why she believes the
linguistic forms in question are used the way they are. The book also points
out the subtle differences between the linguistic forms discussed and the
importance of culture in the findings. Throughout the book, Nakagawa also
makes comparisons with previous studies, indicating how the results contradict
or support those of previous works.

In the book, Nakagawa proposes multiple principles to provide an explanation
for her results, which helps the reader gain a deeper understanding of the
interaction between information structure and the linguistic forms in
question. Researchers looking for new research questions to explore will find
helpful the discussions of possible future directions that often follow the
results sections throughout the book.

There are a few specific areas of the book that future studies could build on.
Because some of the results are based on the acceptability judgments of a few
native speakers, further empirical studies would help confirm the findings.
Nakagawa recognizes this and even provides excellent suggestions for how these
empirical studies could be conducted. Another area that could be built on in
the future is the corpus used. Although the data source for most of the
analysis done in the book uses a corpus of spoken Japanese, the corpus used
consists mainly of formal speech. Because this study used a formal speech
corpus, some examples of the phenomena related to information structure and
linguistic forms are constructed rather than naturally produced. Future
studies should look into data sources that use informal speech as well.

The goal of “Information structure in spoken Japanese: Particles, word order,
and intonation” is to investigate the relationship between information
structure and linguistic forms in spoken Japanese. Overall, I believe it has
achieved this goal and serves to help expand knowledge in this field and to
provide thought provoking insight into how we can move forward. The chapters
of this volume cohere well, presenting a thorough overview of the present
state of research in the field and following up with related results and
discussion. Because Nakagawa makes an effort to link her findings to other
languages and discusses why her findings pop up in multiple languages, the
main audience (i.e., linguists interested in information structure, including
non-Japanese linguists) will benefit from the expanded understanding this book
provides.

Language Science Press has made this book freely available for download at
http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/178.

REFERENCES

Kuno, Susumu. 1972. Functional sentence perspective: a case study from
Japanese and English. Linguistic Inquiry 3. 269–320.

Matsushita, Daizaburo. 1928. Kaisen hyoôjun nihon bumpô [New basic Japanese
grammar]. Tokyo: Kigensha.

Prince, Ellen. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Peter Cole
(ed.), Radical pragmatics, 223–256. New York: Academic Press.

Reinhart, Tanya. 1981. Pragmatics and linguistics: an analysis of sentence
topics. Philosophica 27(1). 53–94.

Rooth, Mats. 1985. Association with focus. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts. (Doctoral dissertation).


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

​​Jeff Peterson holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics/Foreign Language
Acquisition from Purdue University and is currently a Visiting Assistant
Professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at
Brigham Young University. His research interests include Japanese pedagogy,
extensive reading, computer-assisted language learning, pitch accent training,
and corpus research.





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