Decision Theory and Discourse Particles: A Case Study from a Large Japanese Sentiment Corpus

Decision Theory and Discourse Particles: A Case Study from a Large Japanese Sentiment Corpus Christopher Davis University of Massachusetts Amherst Abstract. The distribution and use of the Japanese particle yo is examined using a large annotated sentiment corpus. The data is shown to support a decision-theoretic account of yo’s meaning (Davis, 2009). A decision-theoretic approach to the analysis of sentiment corpora is proposed, by which empirical predictions of decision-theoretic formal analyses can be tested using large sets of naturalistic data. Keywords: discourse particles, sentiment corpora, corpus pragmatics, decision theory, Japanese 1 Introduction There has been a recent surge of interest in the formal semantics and pragmatics literature on the topic of discourse particles (Zimmermann, to appear). Discourse particles straddle the border of semantics and pragmatics, and provide a perfect empirical domain for developing and challenging formal models of linguistic meaning. Discourse particles are, as the name implies, connected to the context of an entire discourse, and force the analyst to go above the sentence level and develop a theory of discourse contexts within which sentences and their associated particles are situated and interpreted. One problem for the development of formal theories of discourse particles is the fact that they typically make no truth-conditional contribution to the sentences in which they occur, and the con- tribution that they do make is typically very difficult to pin down. Most formal studies of particles rely on intuitionistic data from small sets of typically constructed examples. The ineffability and extreme context-sensitivity of discourse particles make it difficult to study them using corpora and other naturalistic data, in which the analysist is unable to control the discourse context and cannot probe the often subtle speaker intuitions that guide the use of these particles. Recently, a number of researchers have exploited large sentiment corpora to explore empirical regularities in the use of expressives and other emotionally-charged language (Potts and Schwarz, 2008; Constant et al., 2008; Davis and Potts, to appear). The structure of these corpora has al- lowed researchers to explore the use of these often ineffable items using large sets of naturalistic texts, on the basis of which empirical estimates of the expressive effects of this kind of language can be made. In this paper, I expand on this line of research by showing how sentiment corpora can be used as an empirical tool in the exploration of decision-theoretic analyses of the semantics and pragmatics of lexical items and constructions. I focus on a particular formal analysis of the Japanese sentence final discourse particle yo (Davis, 2009). This analysis builds on recent de- velopments in decision/game-theoretic semantics and pragmatics (Parikh, 2001; van Rooy, 2003; Benz et al., 2005a). By testing the formal analysis with quantitative data from naturalistic texts, I demonstrate the utility of corpus methods for lexical pragmatics. In Section 2, I outline the decision-theoretic analysis of yo in terms of which the corpus data is analyzed. Section 3 introduces the sentiment corpus used in this paper, and explores the distribu- tion of yo …

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