June 30, 2006: Yasutada Sudo, Katsuaki Nakanishi

Time:: 4:30pm, June 30, 2006
Place:: Room L201, 2nd floor, Building 10, University of Tokyo Komaba campus.
Talk 1
Speaker:: Yasutada Sudo, University of Tokyo
Title:: Japanese Wh-doublets as Metalinguistic Variables
Abstract:: This paper looks at the distribution and the semantic properties of 'wh-doublets' in the Tokyo dialect of Japanese such as "nani-nani" (what-what) and "dare-dare" (who-who). It first shows that they can only appear in certain kinds of quotation and then argues that they behave as a variable over referring expressions. The fomalization of their semantics is couched in a model theory for quotation that treats expressions as primitives, which is also proposed in the paper. This theory nicely captures the basic properties of quotation as well as the behavior of wh-doublets.
Talk 2
Speaker:: Katsuaki Nakanishi, University of Tokyo
Title:: A Unified Approach to Questions, Quantifiers and Coordination in Japanese
Abstract:: Inspired by the syntactic and semantic parallelism found in Japanese between coordination and quantification (as expressed by wh-words in combination with -mo/-ka, the conjunctive/disjunctive particles), and between quantification and question, we investigate how these constructions are uniformly analyzed, in our HPSG framework, as cases where a parameter, denoted by a wh-word or a coordinated phrase, is questioned or quantified for a predicate and present an HPSG formalization of the analysis that can account for, among others, the quantifier scope as marked by the position of the conjunctive particle and the interaction of question and quantification.

June 30, 2006: Yasutada Sudo, Japanese Wh-doublets as Metalinguistic Variables; Katsuaki Nakanishi, A Unified Approach to Questions, Quantifiers and Coordination in Japanese

June 30, 2006: Yasutada Sudo, Japanese Wh-doublets as Metalinguistic Variables;
Katsuaki Nakanishi, A Unified Approach to Questions, Quantifiers and Coordination in Japanese