Paper short abstract:

This study examines ellipsis in Japanese and Korean, focusing on strategies frequently adopted for achieving conciseness. The survey of translated subtitles and newspaper headlines shows that the two languages utilize different strategies in order to meet spatial and temporal constraints.

Paper long abstract:

This study examines strategies frequently adopted in Japanese and Korean texts for achieving conciseness, and investigates how data related to these strategies show differences in structural features between the two languages. In particular, the survey of translated subtitles and newspaper headlines—two types of texts which tend to be shortened—shows that the two languages utilize different strategies in order to meet spatial and temporal constraints (such as word count) and to simultaneously deliver as much information as possible.

We tend to omit elements for efficiency in verbal communication. Production of a maximally informative utterance with minimal effort can involve shortening the utterance, as well as increasing the amount of information per linguistic unit. To this end, we find ellipsis: a universal linguistic behavior observable in both written and spoken utterances involving the omission of certain contextually-evident elements.

In Japanese, one commonly observed tactic in elliptical texts is the complete or partial truncation of predicates. Such predicates which are easily inferable from the retained elements and the established context can potentially be removed in many Japanese subtitle texts. Furthermore, removing certain types of function words from predicates is spatially efficient in that it allows for the elimination of grammatical forms such as tense, modality, aspect, and voice. Predicate truncation can be observed in both subtitles and newspaper headlines in Japanese. In contrast, however, Korean subtitles, rarely display this kind of omission. Much more common is the omission of particles in newspaper headlines. This tendency results in the frequent production of ad hoc, compact word-like structures which can be considered a strategy for the production of Korean headline texts.

These observations lead to the conclusion that these two languages employ different strategies in the production of reduced forms. Japanese frequently makes use of truncated predicates, which are morphologically or syntactically incomplete, by removing verbs or functional elements from predicates. In contrast, Korean shows a tendency toward omitting particles assigned by a predicate and then retaining that predicate. This difference also corroborates the presence of structural differences between the two languages which have been noted in prior contrastive research.