Kohji DOHSAKA
The Role of Accessibility and Identifiability
in Accounting for Japanese Zero Pronouns
Abstract:This paper describes a model to account for the appropriate usage of
Japanese zero pronouns in context. The context of an utterance is modeled as a
set of situations. The usage of a zero pronoun is explained in terms of the
conditions under which the antecedent can be identified among entities in the
situations that the zero pronoun has access to. In particular, I propose the
identifiability condition on a situation about social relationships between
participants, and the accessibility condition described in terms of subordinate
relationships between situations. These conditions have not been captured in
existent models.