Tsuyoshi Ono

University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of East Asian Studies

Voiceless nasal consonants are typologically rare in the world’s languages. The present study investigates the acoustic realization of reported voiceless nasals in the Miyako Ryukyuan dialect Ikema. Voiceless nasals in Ikema occur word-initially and word-medially as part of a geminate or consonant cluster, and are phonemically distinct from modal v...

This paper focuses on ‘clause’, a celebrated structural unit in linguistics, by comparing Finnish and Japanese, two languages which are genetically, typologically, and areally distinct from each other and from English, the language on the basis of which this structural unit has been most typically discussed. We first examine how structural units in...

This article introduces two major approaches to usage-based study of syntax, Emergent Grammar and Interactional Linguistics. Grammarians studying human languages from these two approaches insist on basing their analyses on data from actual language use, especially everyday conversation in a range of languages. Grammar is viewed as emerging from lan...

‘Negative scope’ concerns what it is that is negated in an utterance with a negative morpheme. With English and Japanese conversational data, we show that for an English speaker, calculating negative scope requires that recipients incrementally keep track of all the material in the clause that follows the negative morpheme, which comes early in the...

A number of recent studies () have highlighted the formulaic nature of actual language use. The present paper is part of our larger project which examines the mechanism of formulaicity observed in Japanese conversation and seeks its implications for the nature of human language in general. Japanese is known for its extensive 'backchanneling' behavi...

Preliminary acoustic analysis of apparent vowel devoicing in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan

The present study investigates the nature of vowel devoicing in Miyako, a Ryukyuan language spoken on remote Japanese islands near Taiwan. High vowels in Japanese are commonly described as being devoiced after voiceless consonants in two environments: 1) before a voiceless consonant, 2) at the end of a word (Shibatani 1990). Being a Japonic languag...

The current study investigates voiceless nasals in Miyako, a language spoken on remote Japanese islands near Taiwan, focusing on the dialect Ikema. Voiceless nasals are rare cross-linguistically. Hayashi (2013) suggested that there is phonemic contrast between voiced /n, m/ and voiceless /n̥, m̥/. Pilot data from one speaker both confirmed and refu...

Our paper concerns the grammar of clause combining in Finnish and Japanese conversation. We consider the patterns of clause combining in our data and focus on the verbal and non-verbal cues which allow participants to determine whether, after the end of a clause-sized unit, the turn will end or continue with another clause-sized unit, resulting in...

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore (1994)

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure (1997)

In this paper we first focus on the grammar of Japanese kara ‘because/so’ and kedo ‘but’, traditionally understood as conjunctive particles whose function is to mark a ‘subordinate clause’ and connect it to a following ‘main’ clause. We show that in conversation, these forms are often used turn-finally without an apparent main clause and that they...

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in “increments” among students of conversational interaction. We first outline “incrementing” as an analytical problem (i.e., as turn construction unit extension) by tracing its origins back to Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's famous turn-taking paper (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974). We then summariz...

Japanese benefactive verbs have traditionally been investigated rather extensively with particular attention given to semantic and pragmatic dimensions (Ooe 1975, Kuno 1978, Shibatani 2000, etc). Studies have centered upon fascinating arrays of examples where notions such as perspective and viewpoint are encoded as part of lexical meanings. In this...

This presentation introduces our collaborative project (involving researchers from Canada, Japan, and the U.S.) on the language of Ikema in Okinawa, Japan. We highlight the problems we encountered and our attempts to overcome them - a necessary step before engaging in “Documentary Linguistics” (Himmelmann 1998) on Ikema. Ikema is a typical endanger...

A new area of research called Interactional Linguistics highlights linguistic structure in relation to naturally occurring interaction and is characterized by its cross-linguistic orientation. As a contribution to this new area of research, the present volume is a collection of papers with a cross-linguistic focus; they examine what is often called...

This cross-linguistic study focuses on ways in which conversationalists speak beyond a point of possible turn completion in conversation, specifically on turn extensions which are grammatically dependent, backward-looking and extend the prior action. It argues that further distinctions can be made in terms of whether the extension is prosodically i...

Data is data and model is model: You don?t discard the data that doesn?t fit your model!* RITVA LAURY TSUYOSHI ONO CaliforniaStateUniversity,Fresnoand UniversityofAlberta UniversityofHelsinki We have read with great interest the article published byFrederick Newmeyer in a recent issue of Language (Newmeyer 2003). As discourse-functional grammarians...

Japanese first-person "pronouns" in conversation are found not to be good clausal arguments and not to be used just for reference. They do not form a unitary category, but rather exhibit three separate construction-specific uses, each with its own set of grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, and pro- sodic properties, thus supporting nonmodular represe...

Although in written Japanese grammatical relations such as subject and object are marked by postpositional particles, in informal conversation they may occur without any particles. This paper examines the occurrence and non-occurrence of the direct object marker o in spontaneous informal conversation and clarifies that the choice of object marking...

Since the inception of modern approaches to grammar, Japanese ga has been treated as a marker indicating the grammatical relation `subject.' If this is an accurate characterization of ga, then we would expect ga to occur to mark a grammatical category consisting of `A' (transitive subject) and `S' (intransitive subject) (Comrie, 1978; Dixon, 1979)....

In this paper we investigate the relationship between interaction and syntax. Using a database of conversational American English, we show how what has traditionally been taken as ‘syntax’ is intimately involved in the interactional organization of conversational discourse, and we propose a way of thinking about syntax which allows us to integrate...

Japanese exhibits several grammaticized uses of two verbs oku ‘to put down/keep’ and shimau ‘to put (something) away/finish’: oku as a marker for preparative /purpose, perfect and volitional, and shimau as a marker for frustrative, perfect and non-volitional/evidential. These grammaticized uses nicely reflect the lexical meaning of the two verbs, a...

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Compared to natural conversations, textbook dialogues 1) focus almost entirely on exchanging information, 2) are mainly made up of pairs of complete sentences, such as question-answer pairs, instead of the shorter, non-paired units found in actual speech, 3) contain too much new information in one utterance, potentially hindering communication, and...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Barbara, 1996.