Aspects of Clause Politeness in Japanese: An Extended Inquiry Semantics Treatment

ASPECTS OF CLAUSE POLITENESS IN JAPANESE: AN EXTENDED INQUIRY SEMANTICS TREATMENT John A. Bateman* USC/Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, CA 90292 U.S.A. (e-mail: bateman@va=a.isi.edu) Abstract The inquiry semantics approach of the Nigel compu- tational systemic grammar of English has proved capa- ble of revealing distinctions within propositional con- tent that the text planning process needs to control in order for adequate text to be generated. An extension to the chooser and inquiry framework motiwLted by a Japanese clause generator capable of expressing levels of politeness makes this facility available for revealing the distinctions necessary among interpersonal, social meanings also. This paper shows why the previous inquL'y framework wu incapable of the klnd of se- mantic control Japanese politeness requires and how the implemented extenslon achieves that control. An example is given of the generation of a sentence that is appropriately polite for its context of use and some implications for future work are suggested. 1 Introduction - inquiry se- mantics • A crucial task in text generation is to be able to con- trol linguktic resources so as to make what is gen- erated conform to what is to be expre~ed. In the computational systemic-functional grammar (SFG) 'l~gel' (Mann, 1985; Mztthleseen, 1985; Mann and ~/~atthlessen, 1985), this task is the responslbility of the grammar's inquirv memardice. Nlgel follows gen- eral systemic-functlonni linguistics (SFL) practice in presenting grammar as a resource for expressing mean- ings; meanings are realized by a network of interlock- ing options and ps_,-ticular grammatical forms are ar- rived at by making choices In this network. Gener- ating appropriate text is then a problem of making the chokes in such a way that the distinct needs of individual texts to be expressed are satisfied. This is *Thk research was supported by a post-doctoral re- search fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Tokyo) and the Royal Society (London), and was principally carried out at the Nagao Laboratory of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Kyoto University. achieved by means of choice experts, or ©hooserl, that collectively ensure that the choices made will be those appropriate for any particular text need. Each choice point in the grammar network has associated with it a chooserwhose responslbiHty is to interrogate the text need in respect of just those aspects of meaning nec- essary for determining the appropriate option to take. These choosers are formalized as decision trees whose nodes consist of basic knowledge base interrogation primitives called inqu/r/es. Each aspect of meaning to be expressed that the ~ a r needs to know about is made a~cesslble to the choosers by means of a single inquiry whose func- tion le to determ;Y,e where any particular meaning to be expressed stands on that aspect. For example, should the gr=mm~r need to know whether the text need was for the expression of a unitary object (say, a llon) rather than a set object (lions), then at the appro- priate choke points in the grammar choosers …

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