GENGO KENKYU (Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan)

The first person as speaking and the second as spoken to are morphologically marked and positive categories, whereas the third as unmarked and negative. The so-called third person affixes in the Turkic, Mongolian and Ainu languages are zero in nouns and also in verbs. Japanese, Korean, Chinese etc. have no category of person. Those which have been treated as the third person pronouns are diversed from demonstratives. Turkic -(s) i is not the third person suffix, but a definite ending, and -sin is not an imperative third person suffix, but an optative conjugational ending.

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This paper presents a system which aims at a formal description of accentual alternations in Tokyo dialect within the framework of generative phonology.
The organization of the system is as follows:
(i) Accentual information is encoded in lexical entries by means of Accentual Features.
(ii) A Compound Rule is formulated as a redundancy rule, which derives the values for the Accentual Features of a compound on the basis of the values of its constituent elements.
(iii) The surface tone pattern is derived by Tone Assigment Rules, which apply to the output of a Compound Rule.
(iv) The domains in which a Compound Rule and Tone Assignment Rules operate are called Accentual Unit and Accentual Phrase, respectively.
A tentative extended version of the system applicable to dialects other than Tokyo dialect is also proposed.

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“Modifier Noun no Noun” constructions in Japanese (e. g. chiisana kodomo no te) are structurally ambiguous in that the Modifier can modify either the first Noun or the “Noun no Noun” as a whole. But in actual use they are not usually felt to be ambiguous, because we can understand the unambiguous messages underlying them by making use of world knowledge and contextual information which are stored in our memory. The purpose of this paper is to construct a model on the process of disambiguating these constructions. The model proposed in this paper is based on the analysis of many examples found in literary works etc., and invokes the integrated processing hypothesis proposed by Schank & Birnbaum (1984) and the hierarchical memory model proposed by Tanaka (1976).
In section 1 are discussed those cases which can be disambiguated out of context, whereas in section 2 are discussed those cases the complete disambiguation of which requires contextual information.

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