Linguistic Studies of Dialogue

Takao GUNJI, Mitinao MATUI, and Akira OHTANI

Department of Language and Information Sciences

Graduate School of Language and Culture, Osaka University

1-1 Machikaneyama-cho, Toyonaka, OSAKA 560, Japan

e-mail: gunji@lisa.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp

In this study, we explore the relationship between the syntactic component of Japanese with other components in the grammar, particularly, both morphological and phonological components. In doing so, we adopt a variant of constraint-based grammar, which assumes that language components mutually constrain one another in a static way. Thus, various kinds of information are shared by many components. This year, we have conducted some preliminary study concerning morphological and phonological relationships of verbs (verb stems) and adjacent auxiliary elements. As a result, we have demonstrated that many of apparent syntactic phenomena, such as word order variation (scrambling) and honorification, can be adequately treated mainly within the morphological component, provided information in other components are freely accessible. Another result obtained this year is that we were able to give a fairly complete description of the phonological shape of the verb stems and following auxiliary elements when the verb appears in highly inflected forms such as in the euphonic form (`onbinkei'). Our system is based on the idea of optimality. In this approach, grammatical constraints are designed to overgenerate possible alternatives for a representation of a linguistic information. An independent component, which is sensitive to universal and language-specific cost-inducing constraints, will help to choose the most likely candidate. We have also developed a formal system of treating accent patterns, which will be further extended in the following years.

Keywords: constraint-based grammar, morphology, phonology, adjacency, scrambling, causative, honorification