Discourse Segment and Japanese Referring Expressions: Are These Bare NPs or Proper Names ?

Proceedings of PACLIC 19, the 19th Asia–Pacific Conference on Language, Information and Computation Discourse Segment and Japanese Referring Expressions: Are These Bare NPs or Proper Names? Etsuko Yoshida Mie University 1577 Kurimamachiya-cho, Tsu, Mie 514-8507 Japan tantan@human.mie-u.ac.jp Abstract Forms of Japanese referring expressions are mainly divided into four types: bare NPs, demonstrative NPs (i.e. either as determiner or as pronoun) and zero pronouns. Out of the four types of the referring expressions, bare NPs are the most common type as a subsequent mention and zero pronouns are used only in limited conditions. Based on the centering framework, the results suggest that the center of attention is maintained by the chain of NPs rather than zero pronouns, and the chain of NPs is correlated with the global focus of discourse coherence. There is no doubt that bare NPs mainly carry the topic entity and continue to be used both within the border of discourse segment and over the discourse segment boundaries, while the zero pronoun can carry the topic entity only in the limited context of discourse and is likely to discontinue within the discourse segment. This result is not fully explained by the existing anaphora resolution and it is difficult to predict the typical pattern of referential transitions in naturally occurring discourse. It is worth noting that the repetitive use of bare NPs tends to function as proper names in the Japanese spoken discourse. 1. Introduction Forms of Japanese referring expressions are mainly divided into four types: bare NPs, demonstrative NPs (i.e. either as determiner or as pronoun) and zero pronouns. Out of the four types of the referring expressions, bare NPs are the most common type as a subsequent mention and zero pronouns are used only in limited conditions. In English, on the other hand, NPs are the major type of reference used in the discourse and there seems to be a parallelism in distribution between English and Japanese when the topic entity is in the process of being established in discourse. Based on the discourse understanding model, I will argue that the forms of anaphor are not always shorter, and the center of attention is maintained by the chain of NPs rather than (zero) pronouns both within the discourse segment and over the segment boundaries. 2. General view As a general rule, English indefinite and definite nouns corresponds to Japanese bare nouns whose functional role is realized by different case markers such as wa ‘topic’, ga ‘subject’, wo ‘object’, or frequently omitting any marker. English pronouns basically correspond to zero pronouns in Japanese. As Clancy (1980) insists, it is assumed that implicit referring expressions (i.e. pronouns and zeros) are cognitively perceived as a focus of attention in discourse, whereas the occurrence of explicit referring expressions (i.e. noun phrases) reflects a shift of topic, alteration of the participant’s perspectives, the exclusion of ambiguous candidates, and other aspects of the discourse situation. However, are these always the case? It seems that, according to the common ground they can share, the …

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