Japanese Phrases Research Articles

Development of communication support system using lip reading

AbstractThis paper develops a complete communication support system for speech and hearing disorders using lip reading. The proposed system is a high‐level system and consists of a face detector using the Viola–Jones method, lip extraction based on the active appearance model, dynamic programming matching, automatic utterance section extraction, camera control, and message output. We implemented the system in a commercial laptop, and carried out the recognition experiments on 50 Japanese phrases with four subjects for more than 1 month and obtained high recognition accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrated it in various situations such as the sitting position, supine position, and holding position. We confirmed that our system can be used in various situations. © 2013 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Exploring the value of bilingual language assistants with Japanese English as a foreign language learners

We report on a small-scale exploratory study of Japanese students' reactions to the use of a bilingual language assistant on an EFL study-abroad course in the UK and we give an insight into the possible effect of using bilingual assistants on speaking production. First-year university students were divided into three groups all taught by a monolingual (native) speaker of English. Two teachers had monolingual assistants to help them; the third group had a bilingual (Japanese–English) assistant. In the third group, students were encouraged to ask the assistant for help with English meanings and to provide English equivalents for Japanese phrases, especially during student-centred activities. Moreover, the students in the third group were encouraged to code-switch rather than speak hesitantly or clam up in English. In the first two groups, the students were actively discouraged from using Japanese among themselves in the classroom. The data from an open-ended questionnaire suggest that attitudes to having a bilingual assistant were generally positive. Moreover the ‘bilingual’ group made the biggest gains over the three week period in fluency and in overall speaking scores although these gains were not statistically significant. Suggestions for further research are explored particularly in relation to whether a bilingual assistant may provide support with the cross-cultural challenges faced by EFL learners.

Scale structure, coercion, and the interpretation of measure phrases in Japanese

This paper investigates the semantics of measure phrases in Japanese. Based on new data, we argue that the interpretation of measure phrases in Japanese is sensitive to scale structure such that (i) measure phrases are introduced by a degree morpheme that selects only for gradable predicates whose scale contains a minimal element (i.e., a lower closed scale) and (ii) violations to this restriction are repaired via coercion, which forces a comparative interpretation with a contextually determined standard and hence a minimal element. We compare the Japanese facts to data in other languages and argue that the requirement of having a minimal element is not specific to Japanese, but universal. We show that languages may vary in how they deal with potential violations of this universal constraint, including coercion of a contextually recoverable derived minimal element (Japanese), ungrammaticality (e.g., Spanish, Korean, Russian), and a hybrid system of ungrammaticality for some adjectives and allowed constraint violation for others (e.g., English, German, Italian).

The applicability ofHoshin Kanrifor strategic planning and deployment in the public sector: A case study from NHS North East

The gap between strategy formulation and its implementation has been cited as one of the main reasons why strategies fail. This paper outlines the development and early implementation of a strategy deployment framework using Hoshin Kanri principles. Hoshin Kanri is a Japanese phrase that describes a systematic approach to deploying strategies to ensure alignment between strategy and implementation. These principles have been used very successfully by world-class private sector companies. The first part of the paper defines Hoshin Kanri principles, explores their history and how it is the critical success factor for many world-class organisations. This is followed by a case study description of how these principles were used to develop and implement the NHS North East's objectives, goals, initiatives and monitoring metrics framework.

N'-ellipsis and the structure of noun phrases in Chinese and Japanese

It has been widely assumed since Kitagawa and Ross (Linguist Anal 9: 19–53, 1982) that noun phrases in Chinese and Japanese are quite similar in structure. They are N-final in surface word order, they employ “modifying markers” (de in Chinese and no in Japanese) extensively, and they require classifiers for numeral expressions. In this paper, we argue that, contrary to appearance, they have quite distinct structures. We examine N'-ellipsis in the two languages and present supporting evidence for the hypothesis argued for by Simpson (in: Tang and Liu (eds.) On the formal way to Chinese languages, 2003), among others, that Chinese noun phrases are head-initial. According to this hypothesis, de is D, and a classifier heads another projection within DP. Japanese noun phrases, on the other hand, are head-final. No is a contextual Case marker, as proposed by Kitagawa and Ross (Linguist Anal 9: 19–53, 1982), and classifier phrases are adjuncts modifying nominal projections. Our discussion shows that Kayne’s (The antisymmetry of syntax, 1994) analysis of N-final relatives applies elegantly to Chinese but not to Japanese. It thus suggests that Japanese relative clauses are head-final throughout the derivation.

Filled pauses as cues to the complexity of upcoming phrases for native and non-native listeners

We examined whether filled pauses (FPs) affect listeners’ predictions about the complexity of upcoming phrases in Japanese. Studies of spontaneous speech corpora show that constituents tend to be longer or more complex when they are immediately preceded by FPs than when they are not. From this finding, we hypothesized that FPs cause listeners to expect that the speaker is going to refer to something that is likely to be expressed by a relatively long or complex constituent. In the experiments, participants listened to sentences describing both simple and compound shapes on a computer screen. Their task was to press a button as soon as they had identified the shape corresponding to the description. Phrases describing shapes were immediately preceded by a FP, a silent pause of the same duration, or no pause. We predicted that listeners’ response times to compound shapes would be shorter when there is a FP before phrases describing the shape than when there is no FP, because FPs are good cues to complex phrases, whereas response times to simple shapes would not be shorter with a preceding FP than without. The results of native Japanese and proficient non-native Chinese listeners agreed with the prediction and provided evidence to support the hypothesis. Response times of the least proficient non-native listeners were not affected by the existence of FPs, suggesting that the effects of FPs on non-native listeners depend on their language proficiency.

Vector‐based language generation for associatively evoking environmental images

A novel language generation method was proposed for spoken dialogue systems. The method selected verbal expressions for sensory inputs using a vector‐based method. A weather‐reporter system was implemented with seven input categories of weather parameters including temperature, humidity, wind velocity, and cloud cover. The system selected the most appropriate short phrase for representing the measured weather parameters to let the listener associatively imagine the reporter’s weather condition descriptions. The system included 149 short phrases for weather expressions, each represented by a 62‐element vector called the template vector. Given the 62‐element input vector for a set of weather parameters, one or two phrases were selected based on the similarity measured between the input and template vectors. The system was able to produce an expression by combining a couple of phrases. A dissimilarity measuring algorithm was proposed to assign the conjunction ‘‘and’’ or adversative ‘‘but’’ automatically to conjoin two phrases. A bilingual capability was also added for enabling the system to output English and Japanese phrases. For English outputs, sentence‐initial phrases were added to the selected phrases depending on the similarity value, while sentence‐finals were added for Japanese outputs. Evaluation experiments showed that automatic conjunction assignment can function with high reliability.

Indeterminate Phrase Quantification in Japanese

This paper examines the question of how so-called indeterminate phrases in Japanese (Kuroda 1965) associate with relevant particles higher in the structure. In the universal construction in Japanese, the restrictor (provided by an indeterminate phrase) sometimes appears to be separate from the universal particle mo. It is proposed that quantification at a distance is only apparent, and that the restriction is in fact provided locally by the sister constituent of mo as a whole. The proposal leads us to a straightforward uniform picture of the syntax-semantics mapping of the universal construction and wh-questions, building upon Hamblin’s (1973) semantics for wh-phrases as sets of alternatives. It allows for a switch of perspective on a long-standing puzzle regarding locality effects in the indeterminate–particle association by deriving the locality pattern from the way indeterminate phrases are interpreted and associated with particles, without any stipulations.

Dynamic model for a defective production system with Poka-Yoke

This paper proposes a dynamic model for a defective production system with Poka-Yoke. Poka-Yoke is a Japanese phrase which means mistake-proofing. The technique of Poka-Yoke has been diversely applied in modern production systems. In this study, we evaluate the total cost of a defective production system with Poka-Yoke. We also use a practical case in automotive industry to verify the proposed model. The case study reveals that Poka-Yoke is a cost-effective mechanism that generates satisfactory return of a defective production system, the effect of which depends on the investment cost of Poka-Yoke.

Tokyo story

Tokyo is an amazing capital city, just as you would expect: tall buildings, bright lights, overcrowded and fast paced. Japan was a bit of a culture shock at first, but things have settled down since I learned a few key Japanese phrases for such questions as 'Can I have... ?' and 'Where is... ?' There are many places to visit in this city of almost 15 million people. Getting around is straightforward, as there is an efficient underground system with the station names in English as well as Japanese. The trains are on time and fully air-conditioned, but during rush hours it can get very uncomfortable with so many people squashed inside the carriages. The food ranges from inexpensive pavement cafes serving batter-fried octopus to exclusive sushi restaurants. Every type of food is available in the many restaurants, but I enjoy trying traditional Japanese dishes. The food is always fresh, well presented and tasty. Some of the more unusual dishes include raw horse, raw eggs, sea urchins and live fish. I have been taken to a karaoke bar by my work colleagues and it was great, but very different from what I had expected. You only sing to the people you are with and there are a number of rooms in the bar, depending on how many of you there are, which reduces the public humiliation factor.

On Compassion in the Fourth Passage of the Tannisho

The Japanese phrase, Kono jihi shijunashi in the fourth passage of the Tannisho, has been understood to mean that our compassion is not throughgoing. But in my opinion it means that it is endless. Tannisho collects Shinran's sayings. By reading this book, we understand that Shinran is a man of compassion.

Multiple subject constructions in Japanese and the development of AGRP in L2 English

Starting from the assumption that Japanese has no subject–verb agreement, this paper focuses on the acquisition of agreement, specifically on structure building of a functional category AGRP (agreement phrase) which provides a configuration in which nominative case is licensed/checked in a bi-unique SpecAGR relation. L2 clausal structures corresponding to Japanese multiple subject sentences receive particular scrutiny since the possibility of licensing more than one subject phrase is expected to influence L2 implementation of an AGRP in this context. Relying on a written corpus, the paper outlines a transition to a grammar with AGR, drawing on lexical learning (Clahsen, Eisenbeiss and Penke 1996), structure-building (Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1996, 1998) and elements of constructionism (Herschensohn 2000). The data indicate that Japanese speakers create a bi-unique spec-head relation for agreement. However, in clauses corresponding to multiple subject sentences, instances of failed agreement suggest that co-indexing is not yet consistently carried out with the phrase in SpecAGR. Also, instances of inappropriate predication and caseless DPs indicate that creation of AGRP does not bring about an immediate solution to the problem of integrating the multiple subject phrases in Japanese into English clausal structure.

A topographical study of ERP correlates of semantic and syntactic violations in the Japanese language using the multichannel EEG system

Language processing was investigated using event-related potentials obtained using a multichannel (58-channel) EEG system, with regard to semantic dependency (i.e., selectional restriction between a verb and the arguments it takes: the SR type) and syntactic dependency between sentence-final particles and interrogative phrases (the WH-Q type) in Japanese. It was found that semantic violations elicited the conventional N400, which was distributed in the bilateral occipital and the right temporal regions, and that the syntactic violations elicited the P600 in a broad area, predominantly in the centroparietal regions. Scalp current density mappings suggested that the right temporal cortex plays a significant role in integrating pieces of contextual information, especially when it is difficult to integrate a word in the context of a sentence, and that the P600 was connected to the syntactic processes conceivably indexed by the left temporal current sink with a relatively early onset.

Disambiguation of Syntactic Structures Using the Strength of Association in Three Word Dependency Relations*

We propose a syntactic disambiguation method that uses a measure of strengths of association that hold among three words in co-occurrence relations. Using the method, a disambiguation experiment in Japanese noun phrases with particle no is conducted. Its result is better than those of others and seems to show an effectiveness in resolving syntactic ambiguities appearing also in coordinated constructions, prepositional phrase attachments, and the like in English.

Prosodic boundaries and syntactic branching in Japanese and English

This paper explores communalities and differences in prosodic boundary marking in English and Japanese. Kubozono (1989) observed an interesting asymmetry in Japanese: that the onset of a right branching syntactic constituent is characterized by sudden pitch rise, not observed at the onset of a left-branching constituent, which he attributed to the phonetic realization rule of a metrical boost. Left-branching constitutes the unmarked direction of embedding in Japanese phrase structure. English is overwhelmingly right branching in its syntactic structures. The metrical boost proposed by Kubozono is similar to the mechanism of f0 baseline resetting often proposed to explain juncture marking at major phrase boundaries. English has a prosodic asymmetry, parallel to the Japanese case, whereby prosodic boundary marking is required, at the boundary of certain left-branching constituents. The paper seeks to replicate Kubozono’s observations and to compare the phonetic realization of juncture in Japanese and English from pairs of syntactically ambiguous left- and right-branching phrasal constructions. A perceptual experiment was conducted to ascertain that Japanese listeners reliably employed prosody to disambiguate the utterances. Acoustic measurements of fundamental frequency and segment duration were made to assess Kubozono’s theory of a metrical boost.

Against IP-adjunction scrambling

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. Miyagawa (1996), in his attempt to accommodate this phenomena to the MP, argues that VPadjunction scrambling should be analyzed as base-generated constructions and suggests that IP-adjunction scrambling is motivated by some special element like Focus. This paper argues that if we make a natural extension of the categories which can assume strong features, the IP-adjunction scrambling phenomena. too, can be accounted for in the MP without stipulating any special element. Ibis study implies that except that a lexical category V can bear a strong D-feature. nothing is special about Japanese phrase structure.

A syntactic account of light verb phenomena in Japanese

A syntactic account of light verb phenomena in Japanese is proposed in preference to Grimshaw and Mester's (1988) argument transfer account. A close examination of the suru construction (in which the light verb suru occurs with a verbal noun) suggests that the argument transfer account cannot explain certain facts of this construction (e.g., “transfer” of adjuncts). In addition, contrary to a previous assumption, many verbs other than suru - all raising or control verbs — exhibit the crucial properties of a light verb. Light verb properties of these raising and control verbs can be explained once these light verb constructions are recognized as raising or control constructions, in which the verbal noun heads a syntactic predicative complement of these verbs. In the proposed analysis, “transferred” arguments are syntactically displaced out of the predicative complement, as is generally possible with raising/ control constructions. This view, together with independently motivated Japanese phrase structure rules, accounts for all the light verb properties of those verbs without any special mechanism such as Argument Transfer. This analysis can also be extended to suru, which can function as a control verb. An LFG analysis incorporating this idea is proposed, utilizing the notion of Functional Uncertainty.

Varietal conditioning in Japanese/English code-switching

This paper demonstrates that the patterns of Japanese/English code-switching found in Canadian Niseis' (second generation Japanese) in-group speech are conditioned by the varieties of bilingual speech characterized in terms of base language. In the variety where Japanese is the base. English nouns are used (borrowing). In the variety where English is the base. Japanese phrases and sentences occur sporadically. In the variety where neither Japanese nor English predominates, switching of various syntactic items occurs (intrasentential code-switching). Thus, a common word order is not necessary for intrasentential code-switching to take place: borrowing is not the alternative to intrasentential code-switching when two languages with different word order are in contact as Poplack et al. (1989) and Sankoff et al. (1990) claim.

Speaking English with a Japanese mind

ABSTRACT: Japanese who speak English are likely to express themselves using a style and vocabulary originating in Japanese. The sequence of information expressed in Japanese differs from the usual sequence in English. Words and phrases in English and Japanese do not exactly match each other in meaning. Social concepts differ. These differences can cause unexpected misunderstanding. Fortunately, with the increasing number of non‐Japanese learning the Japanese language and the great expansion of English learning in Japan, these problems may be on the decline.

A functional analysis of Japanese/English code-switching

Functions of code-switching in bilingual communities have been studied extensively (e. g., Auer, 1984; Blom and Gumperz, 1972; Gumperz, 1982; Heller, 1988 Romaine, 1989 G. Sankoff, 1972 Scotton, 1988). This paper examines the functions served by Japanese/English code-switching in Canadian Niseis' (second generation) overall in-group speech repertoire, which, according to Nishimura (1992), consists of three bilingual varieties resulting from the language choices which the Niseis make depending upon their interlocutor(s). The Niseis use Japanese when talking to native Japanese, mixing in English nouns. Some of these nouns fill in the Niseis Japanese lexical gaps; some are of customary use in the community's daily Japanese; some occur in free variation. The Niseis, talking to each other, use English, interspersing Japanese phrases and sentences to express their shared ethnic identity. The Niseis use both Japanese and English, when talking to combined groups of native Japanese and Niseis, or whenever a kika-Nisei (a Niseis educated in Japan) is present. In this case, the pattern of code-switching is more complex, and the functions served are multiple. They can be classified into four categories: first, those which are related to the interactional processes between the speaker and the interlocutor(s); second, those concerning the organization of discourse; third, those which give stylistic effects; and fourth, those whose motivations are not clear.