Postpositional Particle Research Articles

Effect of acoustic and linguistic contexts on human and machine speech recognition

We compared the performance of an automatic speech recognition system using n-gram language models, HMM acoustic models, as well as combinations of the two, with the word recognition performance of human subjects who either had access to only acoustic information, had information only about local linguistic context, or had access to a combination of both. All speech recordings used were taken from Japanese narration and spontaneous speech corpora.Humans have difficulty recognizing isolated words taken out of context, especially when taken from spontaneous speech, partly due to word-boundary coarticulation. Our recognition performance improves dramatically when one or two preceding words are added. Short words in Japanese mainly consist of post-positional particles (i.e. wa, ga, wo, ni, etc.), which are function words located just after content words such as nouns and verbs. So the predictability of short words is very high within the context of the one or two preceding words, and thus recognition of short words is drastically improved. Providing even more context further improves human prediction performance under text-only conditions (without acoustic signals). It also improves speech recognition, but the improvement is relatively small.Recognition experiments using an automatic speech recognizer were conducted under conditions almost identical to the experiments with humans. The performance of the acoustic models without any language model, or with only a unigram language model, were greatly inferior to human recognition performance with no context. In contrast, prediction performance using a trigram language model was superior or comparable to human performance when given a preceding and a succeeding word. These results suggest that we must improve our acoustic models rather than our language models to make automatic speech recognizers comparable to humans in recognition performance under conditions where the recognizer has limited linguistic context.

A Study on the Variability of Postpositional particle in Korean learner language

A Study on the Variability of Postpositional particle in Korean learner language

Modifying Corpus Annotation to Support the Analysis of Learner Language

A crucial question for automatically analyzing learner language is to determine which grammatical information is relevant and useful for learner feedback. Based on knowledge about how learner language varies in its grammatical properties, we propose a framework for reusing analyses found in corpus annotation and illustrate its applicability to Korean postpositional particles. Simple transformations of the corpus annotation allow one to quickly use state-of-the-art parsing methods.

품사 통용을 이용한 국어 품사 교육 방안

There are nine word class in Korean school grammar. That is noun, pronoun, numeral, adverb, determiner, postpositional particle, verb, adjective, interjection. In Korean school grammar, the criteria which is used in determining word class include considerations on forms, functions and meanings. By the way, a word is used more than two word class, that is currency of the word class. However, currency of the word class helps word class education. My argument begins with review about the school curriculum and the studies precedent. secondary, I discuss the currency of the word class. Lastly, I design a lesson on word class education by the heuristics. In this lesson, I intend and hope to advance the grammatical competence of students.

Präpositionaladverbien im Erst- und Zweitspracherwerb – Pleonasmen oder Funktionsträger?

Abstract Both German monolingual children and Turkish bilingual children use pleonastic locatives for a certain period of time but they do so for different reasons, as will be shown in this paper. Constructions like Das Buch ist auf dem Tisch drauf, where the spatial relation is signaled twice – in the preposition auf and in the adverb drauf – are grammatically acceptable but are considered somewhat colloquial. It is therefore not surprising that adults in the picture-description task being reported here make no use of the spatial repetition. With the children things are different: Those Turkish L2 learners who start to acquire German at the age of 3 begin by using a semantically unspecified prepositional head for all topological relations (e.g. *Der Apfel ist in/bei Baum/Schale/Tisch instead of Der Apfel ist am Baum/in der Schale/auf dem Tisch). Owing to their mother tongue, it takes them quite long to detect the semantic specification in the input. In particular, stressed and post-final elements attract their attention, and not surprisingly they start using the postpositional spatial adverbs and particles to break through the German prepositional system (e.g. *Das Buch ist in/bei Tisch drauf). Unlike Turkish children, young German native speakers combine these adverbial elements with a full prepositional phrase, but with no functional value. As the data indicate, the pleonastic locative construction appears to be a residue of an earlier developmental stage which involves the splitting of a complex pronominal adverb (e.g. da(d)rauf) and stranding the prepositional part (e.g. Da ist ein Buch drauf). The high frequency of sentence final verb particles in the input (often with identical form and transparent spatial meaning) might produce the preserving effect even though meanwhile the full prepositional phrase is used to express a spatial relation. Already at preschool age German children come to recognize the redundancy and finally drop the adverbial element. Turkish children, however, have to rely on the prepositional adverb – as a supportive and stabilizing „function-carrier“ – until they notice that in German it is the preposition that must carry the specific spatial information. This is subsequently transmitted from the postpositional spatial element to the head of the full prepositional phrase.

右中心前回中下部梗塞により失文法を呈した１例

A right-handed 75-year-old man was admitted to our hospital complaining of sudden speech difficulty. Neurological examination showed slight left facial palsy of central origin. Although his spontaneous speech was fluent and contained no phonological or verbal paraphasia, it was like telegraphic speech, omitting or misusing postpositional particles. There was no history of changing handedness or family history of sinistrality or ambidexterity. Brain magnetic resonance imaging revealed fresh infarction of the middle-lower part of the right precentral gyrus. The WAIS-R VIQ, PIQ, and total IQ scores were 108, 100, and 117, respectively. In the explanation of a four-frame comic strip of the SLTA, there were misuses of postpositional particles in both speaking and writing. There was about 10% misuse on 249 questions for inserting postpositional particles in sentences. He had difficulty in changing from active- to passive-voice sentences and vice versa. In this patient, the lesion of the middle-lower part of the right precentral gyrus might be important for the expression of agrammatism in crossed aphasia.

Discourse within a sentence: An exploration of postpositions in Japanese as an interactional resource

This study explores a phenomenon in Japanese conversation that might be regarded as “discourse-within-a-sentence,” or interpolating a sequence of talk during ongoing sentence construction. It explicates the way in which Japanese speakers use postpositional particles as a resource to incorporate an element in a parenthetical sequence into the syntax of a sentence-in-progress. It is shown that the usability of postpositions for achieving discourse-within-a-sentence comes from the situated workings of postpositions used in a wider range of interactional contexts. Through a detailed examination of relevant instances from transcribed Japanese conversations, this study addresses such issues as (i) “sentences” in interaction as both a resource for, and an outcome of, intricate interactional work; (ii) postpositions as resources for retroactive transformations of turn-shapes in Japanese; and (iii) the relationship between typological features of the grammar of a language and forms of interactional practices.I wish to thank the following people for valuable comments at various stages in the development of this article: William Bright, Cecilia Ford, Barbara Fox, Noriko Fujii, Charles Goodwin, Jane Hill, Junko Mori, Tsuyoshi Ono, Jerome Packard, Hiroko Tanaka, and Sandra Thompson. Remaining shortcomings are my responsibility.

Contrastive wa in Japanese: the author's dialogical voices and pragmatic acts

Japanese has a postpositional particle wa which has been categorized as the expression of `literal contrast' (e.g. John ate a pizza, but Mary didn't). This paper reexamines the functions of contrastive wa based on the collection of newspaper articles from the viewpoint of dialogical voices, and claims that contrastive wa manifests itself as the expression of the author's multivoicedness, which often derives from our consciousness experiences (association, evaluation, conflict). The paper argues that the dialogicality of contrast does not exist in its own right but co-exists with pragmatic acts by which author and reader cooperate in a given context to arrive at agreement on the intended meanings. The import of the discovery of the author's implicit voices is tentatively stated to reflect pedagogical implications.

Effects of syntactic information on semantic access of ambiguous verbs in spoken language comprehension: Evidence from a cross‐modal priming experiment1

Abstract: The aim of this study was to examine how syntactic information affects the semantic processing of ambiguous verbs in spoken Japanese. The effect of a postpositional particle on semantic access of an ambiguous verb at the end of the sentence was demonstrated in two kinds of sentences, S‐ga‐V sentences (subject, subjective postpositional particle, and ambiguous verb) and O‐wo‐V sentences (object, objective postpositional particle, and ambiguous verb). A cross‐modal priming method was used in which a target noun was presented visually in Kanji (Chinese) characters either one syllable before the end or immediately after the end of the ambiguous verb. Weak multiple priming occurred in the one‐syllable‐before condition, followed by selective access in the immediately after condition, but this multiple access was partially constrained by the preceding postpositional particle. A brief occurrence of multiple access and rapid transition to selective access were detected. Furthermore, objective particles were found to have stronger constraints on multiple access than on subjective particles. A connectionist model using a constraint‐based lexical approach was consistent with the experimental results.

Japanese Wa in conversational discourse

This study provides evidence to support the claim that a primary function of the postpositional particle wa in Japanese conversational discourse is to mark a contrast. Wa has been widely studied in research on sentence grammar, which has suggested two separate functions of the particle, thematic and contrastive (Kuno 1973a; 1973b; Shibatani 1990). However, no study seems to have been done on conversation. In my study, analysis of 80 tokens of np-wa in conversation has revealed that wa marks a contrast. Furthermore, this study claims that it is the prior discourse that serves to establish the contrastive function of wa.

Морфология говоров Терского берега Белого моря<br>(Morphology of the Dialects of the Ter Coast of the White Sea)

The present article gives an overview of the morphological characteristics of the dialect of two villages on the Ter Coast of the Kola Peninsula, Varzuga and Umba. This topic has not previously been studied thoroughly. Features of this dialect are compared to those known in Arkhangelsk dialects.Salient details in the dialects of the two villages are: the common form for genitive, dative and prepositional cases of class II nouns: -y/-i; the use of the endings -ma/-my in the instrumental plural; the contraction of vowels in verbs and adjectives due to the loss of intervocalic [j]; the use of the postpositional particle -to/ta/ot. Some of the features are rare, for instance, present forms of verbs with a velar stem without the k/č and g/ž shifts (pečet-peket).

The Occurrence and Non-Occurrence of the Japanese Direct Object Marker o in Conversation

Although in written Japanese grammatical relations such as subject and object are marked by postpositional particles, in informal conversation they may occur without any particles. This paper examines the occurrence and non-occurrence of the direct object marker o in spontaneous informal conversation and clarifies that the choice of object marking is a device to facilitate selective focusing on information. Our study shows that zero-marking is the unmarked option for marking direct objects and o is used when the information indicated by the direct object NP is salient in the discourse or when cognitive processing requires some additonal effort.

The Change of Frequency of the Postpositional Particle “ne” in a Communication Where Chiming-In is Controlled

The Change of Frequency of the Postpositional Particle “ne” in a Communication Where Chiming-In is Controlled

Sound Symbolism and Its Syntactic Function in Japanese Post-positional Particles

Native speakers of Japanese tend to verbally describe, specify, and qualify human action and natural phenomena by means of words comprised of seemingly abstract sounds, which suggests that there exists in Japanese symbolic meanings in various sounds which underscore the lexical meaning of those words. Based on previous investigations into the nature and meaning of sound in Japanese, this paper shall attempt to broaden the inquiry regarding the possible existence and function of Japanese sound symbolism through an analysis of its relationship with post-nominal particles.

A quantitative study of gender differences in the ellipsis of the Japanese postpositional particles-waand-ga: Gender composition as a constraint on variability

ABSTRACTIt has been claimed that the ellipsis of postpositional particles is one of the properties of Japanese women's language. The validity of this claim, however, is compromised by several methodological problems in prior research in this area: (1) the subjective comparison of bare percentages without any statistical verification of male–female differences; (2) the neglect of the intersecting relationships among a variety of potential constraints which simultaneously influence the speaker's choice of the variable; and (3) the exclusive focus on single-sex interactions. Conducting multivariate analyses of conversational data from both single-sex and cross-sex peer interactions, this preliminary study demonstrates the overgeneralization of gender-linked differentiation in past work due to the neglect of the relative strength of potential intersecting factors. The results also reveal statistically significant degrees of stylistic intragender variability across different types of gender composition, which counters the static approach to a social variable of gender in the traditional sociolinguistic paradigm.

連接文の理解過程 照応詞の表現形態と先行詞の統語的位置との関係

This article examined processes of relating sentences in comprehension of successive sentences. On the basis of previous findings, it is hypothesized that, if an anaphor is a noun which is identical with its antecedent, sentences can be related faster when the antecedent is in object position than in subject position of the former sentence; on the contrary, if an anaphor is a pronoun, sentences can be related faster when the antecedent is in subject position than in object position. In order to test this hypothesis, the surface form of anaphor (i.e., identical noun vs. pronoun), the syntactic position of antecedent (i.e., object vs. subject), and the postpositional particle of anaphor (i.e., “ga” vs. “wa”) were varied. Subjects read pairs of sentences, so constructed that the first sentence contained an antecedent and the second one contained an anaphor. Consistent with the prediction, the interaction between the surface form of anaphor and the syntactic position of antecedent was observed in comprehension time of the second sentence, regardless of postpositional particle. These results were discussed in terms of how readers utilized the surface form of anaphor in relating successive sentences.

On “Paragrammatistic Paraphasia” in Conduction Aphasia

The grammatical errors observed in three conduction aphasics were reported. These errors were the substitution of a Joshi (postpositional particle in Japanese grammar)for another “Joshi” . The patient usually tried spontaneously to correct the error himself and this behaviour seemed to be very similar to the spontaneous self-correction(conduite d'approche)of phonemic paraphasias which is regarded as a characteristic of conduction aphasia. It was argued that these grammatical errors should be considered a kind of paraphasia rather than paragrammatism in the proper sense of the word. We proposed accordingly that they could be called “paragrammatistic paraphasias”.

助詞ハとガの談話機能の発達

Japanese postpositional particles ‘wa’ and ‘ga’ have discourse function; ‘wa’ conveys old information and ‘ga’ marks new information. The purpose of this study was to examine experimentally the development of differentiated use of ‘wa’ and ‘ga’ according to the discourse function. Ninety subjects of 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 years old and adults made and told stories by looking at pictures in an elicited production task. Subjects at the age of 4 and 5 used only ‘ga’ regardless of context. From 6 to 12 year old subjects began to use ‘wa’ for the referent which appeared in the previous context, but not constantly. Fourteen-year-old subjects and adults systematically differentiated ‘wa’ and ‘ga’ according to the discourse function. ‘Wa’ and ‘ga’ appear in two-word utterance stage, but our study suggests that the complete acquisition of these two particles is very late.

Topic Marking in Haida

0. Ongoing analysis of the role of some postpositional particles in Haida indicates that marking and prominence are important in the organization of this language. Topicalization refers to a process whereby sentence elements are placed at the front of the sentence for the purpose of focus or contrast. Some languages employ topicalization more than others and are said to be topic-prominent languages.' Chinese is the time-honored example of a topic-prominent language. The topic in Haida will be assumed to be any sentence-initial element (a word or phrase) marked with a topic-marking particle. Initial elements without such particles will be said to be foregrounded. Sentence elements in Haida are fore-

Analysis of the Use of Japanese Postpositional Particles by Overseas University Students Studying in Japan

Analysis of the Use of Japanese Postpositional Particles by Overseas University Students Studying in Japan