This paper argues that due to the facts of accent shift, Japanese accent should itself be interpreted as pitch rather than as a diacritic on the basis of which pitch patterns are imposed by rule. The solution offered is tentative and concerns only Tokyo Japanese. It is suggested that consideration of accent in non-Tokyo dialects will strengthen…

This study attempts to account for the distributional restrictions of Japanese head-internal relative clauses, and the restrictions on accessibility of noun phrases to head internal relativization in terms of the Empty Category Principle (ECP). The data indicate that there is a subject/object asymmetry in the distribution of the head - internal…

Problems emerging from previous analyses of epenthesis in Japanese verbal endings are discussed and a crucial relationship between epenthesis and assimilation is argued. The focus is on the occurrence of /i/-epenthesis with certain root-final consonants. The analysis, which incorporates the view that assimilation is accomplished by means of…

This analysis of repeated utterances in Japanese conversational discourse focuses on repetition as an expression of iconicity. In the analysis of a 30-minute conversation among 4 Japanese speakers, the iconic meanings expressed by both reduplication and conversational repetition are highlighted. The iconicity characteristic of conversational data…

Addresses complicated categories of loanwords and their uses in Japanese, an analysis of the developing functions of loanwords; the cultural attitudes that permit borrowings in some semantic areas; and how the present process of borrowing English words has similarities to the borrowing of Chinese language and culture some 1400 years ago.…

Analyzed the argument linking of the commercial transaction frame in English, Russian, and Japanese. The commercial transaction frame is semantically complex, because there are two transfers in opposite directions (money goes from buyer to seller and goods from seller to buyer). English and Russian construe the commercial frame in essentially the…

A study examined the applicability of the Ordering Hypothesis to Japanese suffixes. The hypothesis, which claims that affixes that trigger phonological rules (cyclical affixes) do not appear external to affixes that do not, is found to be an inappropriate assumption in Japanese. Examples in English and Chamorro support this finding. It is…

Explores how children learn the range of aspect inflection to which a verb is amenable. Analyses focus on the children's mastery of Aktionsart specific intersentential patterns. Three conclusions are given based on the study's results. (21 references) (GLR)

Examines whether systematic differences exist in babbling and first words of infants from different language backgrounds (English, French, Japanese and Swedish) and asks whether differences result from the phonetic structure of the languages. Statistically significant differences discerned in the babbling phonetic selection indicates that phonetic…

Argues that contour tones in East Asian languages behave as melodic units consisting of a root node [upper] dominating a branching specification. It is also argued that, with upper as the tonal root node, no more than two rising or falling tones will contrast underlying. (49 references) (JL)

An approach to the study of numeral quantifiers in Japanese reveals some fundamental properties of Japanese, especially those pertaining to movement. Using numeral quantifiers, a demonstration shows that the subject of unaccusative verbs in Japanese originates in the object position and moves to the subject position at S-structure. It is also…

As an optional movement, "scrambling" in Japanese has been one of the major obstacles to the Minimalist Program, in which movements occur only when necessary. One theorist has argued, in an attempt to accommodate this phenomenon to the Minimalist Program, that verb phrase-adjunction scrambling should be analyzed as base-generated constructions and…

Some Japanese examples of several common phonological phenomena (whispered vowels, nuclear friction, and consonant-vowel articulation) are examined. The segmental and transformational characterizations of these and related phenomena are reassessed and it is shown that by paying more careful attention to phonetic detail and abandoning conventional…

The distributional and interpretive properties of the reciprocal "selo" in Korean are analyzed and compared with reciprocals in other languages, particularly Japanese and English. It is proposed that if it can be assumed that there are two homophonous "selos" in Korean, four of the five idiosyncratic properties of…

An analysis of long-distance anaphora, a binding phenomenon in which reflexives find their antecedents outside their local domain, is presented, using data from English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Icelandic, and Italian. It is found that no approach deals with long-distance anaphors exclusively and elegantly. The binding domain…