This study advocates the investigation of soliloquy as a new approach in pragmatics research. The primary function of language is arguably to communicate with others, but language is also used to think. Thoughts constantly emerge in confluent streams of images, concepts, and ideas within the mind; to grasp and manage them, we need language. An analysis of soliloquy can open a window to a better understanding of our mental activities. Based on experimentally obtained soliloquy data in Japanese, three issues are considered: gendered language, the sentence-final particles ne and yo, and the ko-so-a demonstratives. It is demonstrated that soliloquy can shed new light on these widely studied topics. The conclusions reached include that (a) Japanese gendered language is more gendered than recent studies in the field claim, (b) ne and yo are used to monitor and control the speaker's internal information processing, and (c) the deixisanaphra distinction is not clear-cut. © 2011 John Benjamins Publishing Company.

This paper examines Cook's analysis of Japanese politeness as an interactional achievement. Taking a social constructionist perspective, and counter to Ide's notion of discernment, Cook contends that social identities and social relationships are fluid, negotiated during the moment-bymoment unfolding of social interactions. Although such cases can exist, they are not the norm. Cook asserts that speakers are not mere observers of social norms, but, rather, active agents constructing their own social worlds. This too can be valid in certain situations. Examining speechstyle shifts in professor-student consultations in Japanese universities, Cook claims that students exercise total freedom in selecting plain, nonhonorific forms. This paper demonstrates that Cook's data do not support her claim. Students did not shift their speech to plain form in their dialogic mode of discourse. Her data support an analysis demonstrating students' awareness that an appropriate attitude in such a setting is to show deference to the advisor, and that this deference cannot be expressed without the use of honorifics. Speakers of Japanese are not as free in their linguistic behavior as Cook contends. Failure to observe the social norm of polite language (tameguchi) is frequently ridiculed and penalized. This fact demands acknowledgement of Ide's notion of discernment. © Walter de Gruyter.

Circadian oscillation provides selection advantages through synchronization to the daylight cycle. However, a reliable clock must be designed through two conflicting properties: entrainability to synchronize internal time with periodic stimuli such as sunlight, and regularity to oscillate with a precise period. These two aspects do not easily coexist, because better entrainability favours higher sensitivity which may sacrifice regularity. To investigate conditions for satisfying the two properties, we analytically calculated the optimal phase-response curve with a variational method. Our results indicate an existence of a dead zone, i.e. a time period during which input stimuli neither advance nor delay the clock. A dead zone appears only when input stimuli obey the time course of actual solar radiation, but a simple sine curve cannot yield a dead zone. Our calculation demonstrates that every circadian clock with a dead zone is optimally adapted to the daylight cycle.

It is generally recognized that the most significant cue to accent location is fundamental frequency (F0) in both Japanese and English. Furthermore, it is widely believed that a syllable is perceived as accented if the syllable contains an F0 peak. However, Sugito (1972) found that, in Japanese, if an F0 peak is followed by a steep F0 fall, the syllable preceding the F0 peak may be perceived as accented. In this article we present two experiments which investigate the relationship between F0 peak and F0 fall rate in accent perception for Japanese and English. The first experiment confirms that, for Japanese, both F0 peak location and F0 fall rate affect listeners' judgements of accent location. Specifically, the later the F0 peak occurs in a given syllable, relative to the syllable boundary, the greater the F0 fall rate necessary for listeners to perceive the preceding syllable as accented. The second experiment shows that this phenomenon is not unique to Japanese: Perception of accent location in English is also influenced by both F0 peak location and post-peak F0 fall rate.

Circadian oscillation provides selection advantages through synchronization to the daylight cycle. However, a reliable clock must be designed through two conflicting properties: entrainability to synchronize internal time with periodic stimuli such as sunlight, and regularity to oscillate with a precise period. These two aspects do not easily coexist, because better entrainability favours higher sensitivity which may sacrifice regularity. To investigate conditions for satisfying the two properties, we analytically calculated the optimal phase-response curve with a variational method. Our results indicate an existence of a dead zone, i.e. a time period during which input stimuli neither advance nor delay the clock. A dead zone appears only when input stimuli obey the time course of actual solar radiation, but a simple sine curve cannot yield a dead zone. Our calculation demonstrates that every circadian clock with a dead zone is optimally adapted to the daylight cycle.