The Syntactic Processing of Particles in Japanese Spoken Language

Particles fullfill several distinct central roles in the Japanese language.They can mark arguments as well as adjuncts, can be functional or have semanticfuntions. There is, however, no straightforward matching from particles tofunctions, as, e.g., GA can mark the subject, the object or an adjunct of asentence. Particles can cooccur. Verbal arguments that could be identified byparticles can be eliminated in the Japanese sentence. And finally, in spokenlanguage particles are often omitted. A proper treatment of particles is thusnecessary to make an analysis of Japanese sentences possible. Our treatment isbased on an empirical investigation of 800 dialogues. We set up a typehierarchy of particles motivated by their subcategorizational andmodificational behaviour. This type hierarchy is part of the Japanese syntax inVERBMOBIL.