2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Research on "story units" in the narrative discourse of native and non-native Japanese speakers
| Project/Area Number |
16520311
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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 |
Japanese language education
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| Research Institution | Yamagata University |
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Principal Investigator |
WATANABE Fumio Yamagata University, Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences, Associate Professor, 人文学部, 助教授 (00212324)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2006
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| Keywords | discourse analysis / story units / spoken language / written language / topic / subjective expressions / repetition |
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| Research Abstract |
This research aims to investigate 1) the use of particle "wa", subjective expressions, and clausal self- repetition for episode and scene cohesion, and 2) story units recognition. The data for this study come from Japanese native speakers and non-native speakers' (whose native languages were English, Chinese, and Korean) narratives elicited using a 5-minute animated film.
Analysis of the use of "wa" in the native data showed that informants used "wa" in the written data twice as much as in the spoken data to reflect animacy of topic as well as topic-continuity.
Results of the analysis of the subjective expressions used in written narratives included that native speakers 1) evaluated unexpected events negatively using "te simau" more often than non-native speakers, 2) unlike non-native speakers, never used "te simau" at the ending scenes.
I defined clausal self-repetition as repetition of the immediately preceding clause by the same speaker with the same predicate and argument structure as the preceding clause. Building on Minami's (1974, 1993) hierarchical model of Japanese sentence structure. I demonstrated that 1) there is a greater syntactic separation between the preceding clause and the repeating clause in clausal self-repetition pairs than between the repeating clause and the subsequent clause, and 2) the propositional content of the repeating clause belongs to a different information cluster.
Results of the survey of story unit recognition showed that 1) 70% of the utterances marked as the beginning of story units contained an animate NP and an initial discourse marker, although these utterances made up only 15% of total number of utterances, and 2) the choice of referring expressions along with the use of discourse markers play an important role in recognizing story units.
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