ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Japanese as a language that is different from English which is the target of our natural language understanding systems. Japanese has essentially distinctive structures in comparison with them but it has a good affinity to dependency structure, called Kakari-uke, which has been accepted as the essential feature of Japanese sentences. In Japanese, the verb phrase as a predicate is placed at the end of the clause, and grammatical roles such as subject and object are allowed to appear free of order in dependency relations to the verb called Kakari-uke. A Japanese discourse marker, such as oo, ee, sate, mitaina, sorede, souyatte, naruhodo, tsumari, yo or owakarideshou-ga is rather syntactically independent with a pragmatic function or role to manage the flow of conversation without changing any semantic content of the discourse. A Japanese sentence containing multiple clauses without conjunctions is treated as a set of multiple clauses connected with the conjunction in mental image directed semantic theory.
