Experience in annotating connectives in Japanese text – lessons and prospects

Abstract

This paper offers an overview of an attempt to annotate a text in Japanese with the aim of pointing out all possible connections between elementary chunks of discourse, and the connective devices marking them. Being the first experience in Japanese, it asks for a certain adjustment of the annotation rules already used in the existing schools. This primarily touches upon what entities are connected and also upon the definition of a connective. Furthermore, semantic areas covered by connectives also need correction if reviewed through an in-depth analysis of the speaker’s intentions. The obstacles met while carrying out the annotation, and the pervasive patterns revealed, focus around two linguistic factors. On the one hand, structural specifics of the Japanese language cause the speaker to forego multiple transformations warping the surface structure in order to attain linear development of his line of discourse. On the other hand, the genre of the linguistic material (a lecture in tourism marketing) is largely accountable for dominating Causality and Discourse Deployment areas of connectives. It is through those that a higher level of pragmatic motivation is achieved in the explicit markers of the text structure – which turns out crucial in making the speech more persuasive.