We examine a test version of the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (CEJC), currently being built at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo (NINJAL), Japan. By focusing on non-verbal behaviors, we highlight the multimodal nature of the use of the Japanese distal demonstrative are. In particular, video data allows us to observe a previously unrecognized type of are where the speaker uses are while gazing towards and pointing fingers at the cell phone placed near her in order to refer to the photographs digitally stored on it. This use is not anaphoric, as its referent is newly introduced in the conversation through the combined use of are and the speaker’s non-verbal behaviors. It is not spatial either, as that would have resulted in the employment of the proximal demonstrative kore and because the potential referent is not visible on the screen at the time of speech. Instead, it is used to indirectly refer to the digital data stored in the cell phone. Due to a shared understanding that cell phones digitally store photographs, the speaker’s use of are along with simply gesturing at the cell phone makes such a reference possible.
@InProceedings{DAIJU18.10, author = {Saori Daiju and Tsuyoshi Ono}, title = {Studying Japanese Distal Demonstrative Are Using Video Corpus}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Hanae Koiso and Patrizia Paggio}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-16-0}, language = {english} }
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