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16 results

  • Implicit Arguments in Japanese Potentials and Resultatives

  • Wako Tawa, Mineharu Nakayama
  • Journal:
    Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique / Volume 40 / Issue 4 / December 1995
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    27 June 2016, pp. 423-440

  • Many, if not all, languages possess syntactic constructions in which covert arguments, often referred to as “implicit arguments”, are required. While the implicit arguments in Western languages have received considerable attention, the study of the same topic in non-Western languages such as Japanese has been neglected. In this article, the nature of the implicit arguments of the potential and resultative constructions in Japanese is investigated. A detailed examination reveals that the implicit AGENTs in these two constructions differ in terms of the specificity of their reference, which in turn suggests that the representations of the two types of implicit arguments reflect this difference. It is argued that the implicit AGENT of the potential construction should be analyzed as proarb while that of the resultative construction is realized as pro.

The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics
  • Volume 2, Japanese
  • Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, Reiko Mazuka, Yasuhiro Shirai
  • General editor Ping Li
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 August 2006
  • A large body of knowledge has accumulated in recent years on the cognitive processes and brain mechanisms underlying language. Much of this knowledge has come from studies of Indo-European languages, in particular English. Japanese, a language of growing interest to linguists, differs significantly from most Indo-European languages in its grammar, its lexicon, and its written and spoken forms - features which have profound implications for the learning, representation and processing of language. This handbook, the second in a three-volume series on East Asian psycholinguistics, presents a state-of-the-art discussion of the psycholinguistic study of Japanese. With contributions by over fifty leading scholars, it covers topics in first and second language acquisition, language processing and reading, language disorders in children and adults, and the relationships between language, brain, culture, and cognition. It will be invaluable to all scholars and students interested in the Japanese language, as well as cognitive psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists.

  • Performance factors in subject-auxiliary inversion by children*

  • Mineharu Nakayama
  • Journal:
    Journal of Child Language / Volume 14 / Issue 1 / February 1987
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 February 2009, pp. 113-125

  • Children's reported copying-without-deletion errors, like ‘Whose is that is?’, have often been interpreted as the result of a non-adult rule of subject–aux inversion. By contrast, this study presents a performance account of these errors and supports this account by investigating what factors impede children's performance. Using an elicitation task, 16 test sentences were evoked from 16 3- to 5-year-old children. In particular, errors appeared (1) when the subject NP contained a relative clause, (2) when the relative clause had an object gap, and (3) when the relative clause was long. Since errors occurred in response to some sentence types and not others, and the children who made copying-without-deletion errors produced at least four correct responses, these results were interpreted as support for the performance account.

  • Preface

  • Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, Ohio State University, Reiko Mazuka, Duke University, North Carolina, Yasuhiro Shirai, Cornell University, New York
  • General editor Ping Li, University of Richmond, Virginia
  • Book:
    The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 August 2006, pp xvii-xviii

  • Summary

    This is the second volume of the three-volume series on East Asian psycholinguistics that includes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the languages that have received significant research interest in psycholinguistics outside the Indo-European language family. During the past two to three decades, a substantial body of knowledge has accumulated in the study of the cognitive processes and brain mechanisms underlying language use, language acquisition, and language disorders in the Japanese language.

    Most of the work in Japanese psycholinguistics has been influenced by the study of English. However, in recent years, researchers interested in Japanese have employed a variety of theoretical and experimental paradigms to examine various issues in order to understand the human cognitive system. Japanese has served well as a crucial test case for general psycholinguistic theories and models. Both universal and specific aspects of the language have been revealed, which has made significant contributions to this fast-developing field. Although space does not allow us to exhaustively cover the topics and theories concerning Japanese psycholinguistics, we believe that we were successful in including most representative topics in the subfields of Japanese psycholinguistics, and are very pleased to be able to present the state-of-the-art theories and findings written by as many experts as can be included in this volume. As a matter of convenience, the articles in this volume are grouped into two sections: “Language acquisition” and “Language processing.” Please note that all articles are naturally interrelated beyond these groupings.

  • Introduction

    • By Mineharu Nakayama, Associate Professor of Japanese Linguistics, Ohio State University, Yasuhiro Shirai, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Cornell University, Reiko Mazuka, Laboratory Head for Language Development Research, RIKEN Brain Science Institute; Associate Professor of Psychology, Duke University
  • Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, Ohio State University, Reiko Mazuka, Duke University, North Carolina, Yasuhiro Shirai, Cornell University, New York
  • General editor Ping Li, University of Richmond, Virginia
  • Book:
    The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 August 2006, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    This Introduction provides a brief discussion of the characteristics of both spoken and written Japanese that will serve as background knowledge for readers who are not very familiar with the language. At the same time, we refer to specific chapters in this volume that are pertinent to the linguistic aspects under question whenever possible.

    Characteristics of Japanese

    Spoken Japanese

    Sound system Japanese is a mora-timed language with a pitch accent system. A mora is a subsyllabic unit that determines the weight of a syllable. A regular mora is also a syllable, which is either V or CV. In addition, there are three types of morae (called special morae), which are perceived as having the same length as regular morae by Japanese speakers although they do not constitute syllables, viz. moraic consonants (i.e. the first part of geminate consonants or a moraic nasal), e.g. /Q/ in /kaQta/, /N/ in /hoN/, or the second half of a long vowel or a diphthong, e.g. /R/ of /keRki/. One mora also corresponds to one kana character in writing (see the section on written Japanese below). Unlike English, a language with a stress accent system, Japanese lexical accent is based on pitch, high vs. low, as shown below:

    1. (1) a. ame “rain” (HL)

    2. b. ame “candy” (LH)

    The accents shown above are those of the Tokyo dialect. These accents do not change in speech within a dialect (e.g. they are not affected by intonation).