Overview

In many East Asian languages, despite the prevalent occurrence of implicit reference, reference management is largely achieved without recourse to familiar agreement features. For this reason, recovering ellipted reference has been a perplexing problem in the analysis of these languages. This book elucidates the linguistic mechanisms for ellipsis resolution in Japanese, mechanisms which involve complex processes of inference that integrate grammatical, sociolinguistic, and discourse considerations with real world knowledge. These processes are realised in an integrated algorithm, the validity of which is tested against naturally-occurring written texts. This book also builds connections between theoretical linguistics and practical applications. The findings not only have theoretical implications for identifying crucial factors in the linguistic encoding of implicitly expressed information, factors which are very different from those found in European languages, but also offer practical applications, particularly for the design of machine translation systems and for learners of Japanese.

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9789027230768

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This book is a very thorough study of the phenomenon of ellipsis in Japanese. Nariyama's discussion of previous research is fully adequate, and she adds a new dimension to the study of the topic by carefully integrating what is already known from more particularized studies about the role of predicate devices and discourse devices in reference tracking. This alone makes Nariyama's book worthy of publication. -- Heiko Narrog, Tohoku Unversity, in Language 81(4), 2005

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