1997 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Contrastive studies on discourse functions of the deteminers in Japanese, French and English in the framework of the Mental Space Theory
| Project/Area Number |
08837005
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
談話(ディスコース)
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
SAKAHARA Shigeru The University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences, Professor, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 教授 (40153902)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1996 – 1997
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| Keywords | Definite article / Bare nouns / Demonstratives / Discourse processing / Russellian theory of description / Mental space / Pronoun / Possessive |
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| Research Abstract |
I have shown a surprising parallelism of behavior in spite of the difference in meaning between bare nouns in Japanese and definite noun phrases in English, and explained it in tems of discourse prodessing. Linguistic input is processed in relation to the discourse resources consisting of three distinct data bases : general knowledge, utterance situation and discourse memory. Discourse memory is further divided in three subdomains : linguistic data memory, linguistic understanding memory, and long-term discourse memory.For each of these five domains, some means must be available for identifying elements there. Pronouns can only search in the linguistic data memory and demonstratives, in the utterance situation or the linguistic data memoty. Definites in English and bare nouns in Japanese usually express roles with parameters left unspecified. They yield values when the parameters are specified, but they don't tell how to identify the appropriate parameters. This underdetemination is exactly what is meeded for them to be able to operate a search in any of the domains within the discourse resources. If any language needs a means to signal this kind of default search and if only bare nouns in Japanese and definites in English can fulfill this, they will certainly assume it. We thus hypothesize that the parallelism of behavior of definites in English and bare nouns in Japanese comes from this kind of general principle of language.
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