ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part investigates the phenomena of ellipsis and wa-marking in Japanese conversation. It examines how ellipsis and wa-marking are actually used in natural, everyday speech, based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the CallHome Japanese (CHJ) corpus. The part devotes considerable attention to the relevant theoretical linguistic literature on ellipsis and wa-marking, in order to provide context and motivation for our empirical investigations. It focuses on two types of ellipsis in colloquial Japanese: the omission of arguments to predicates, and the ellipsis of grammatical particles after noun phrases. The part argues that certain patterns of argument and particle ellipsis in the CHJ data reflect universal tendencies across human languages, while other patterns are perhaps specific to Japanese conversation. Ellipsis and wa-marking are both optional linguistic mechanisms.
