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Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering

Paper · 1994 · Marilyn Walker, Masayo Iida and Sharon Cote

Summary

The paper addresses how to resolve ZEROS (unexpressed verb arguments, often called zero pronouns) in Japanese so that the result can be used in machine translation and language understanding systems. The authors take a middle position between inference-only and syntax-only accounts. They argue that interpretation is inferential but that syntactic cues restrict it. To formalize this, they extend CENTERING theory to Japanese. The cues they examine are the topic marker wa, the case markers ga, o and ni, and speaker's EMPATHY, which is signalled by auxiliary verbs such as kureta and kita.

The evidence comes from native-speaker judgments on constructed four-utterance minimal pairs. The results confirm that these markers shape how zeros are read. They also show that an entity gains salience from having earlier been the topic and from being realized as a zero. From this the authors derive a rule of ZERO TOPIC ASSIGNMENT (ZTA) and use centering to state when it may apply. Their account handles readings that earlier analyses by Kuno and Kameyama either miss or mispredict.

Key points

  • Survey design: about 35 native speakers were recruited from the sci.lang.japanese and comp.research.japan newsgroups. Data came from three e-mail surveys with untimed, mostly forced-choice judgments.
  • Controls in the test items: discourse entities shared the same gender, verbs with causal bias were avoided, cue words were few, and honorifics were left out.
  • Ranking of forward centers: the Cf ranking takes grammatical topic and empathy into account. For example, it correctly predicts a reading where Kameyama's SUBJECT/IDENT property-sharing default predicts the opposite.
  • Two kinds of topic: ZTA separates the grammatical (wa-marked) topic from a zero topic. As a result, a wa-marked entity is the default salient entity but not always the most salient one.
  • Cross-language claim: centering is claimed to be language-independent except for one parameter, the Cf ranking. The authors conjecture that ZTA holds in free-word-order languages with zeros, and they propose checking it against a sizable collection of authentic Japanese text.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Stanford UniversityStanford · United States434 works · 314,419 citations🎓University of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia · United States221 works · 63,234 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Discourse analysis · 466 works

Cite

Cite as Marilyn Walker, Masayo Iida and Sharon Cote. 1994. Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{walker1994japanese,
  title = {{Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering}},
  author = {Marilyn Walker, Masayo Iida and Sharon Cote},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1994},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J94-2003/}
}

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