Centering in Japanese: How to rank forward-looking centers in a

This paper discusses Japanese discourse in the Centering framework, by analyzing what we call the ‘forwardlooking centers’ in Japanese complex sentences containing an adverbial clause of reason. Naturally occurring discourse was collected for this research, and a hypothesis is made that, at least in headfinal languages, the forward-looking centers in the matrix clause are ranked higher, by using the ‘Matrix-higher’ way, than those in the subordinate clause for the maximum degree of coherence in a discourse segment. This paper first introduces the background of Centering, both the general notion and the application of it to various languages. The specifics of Japanese that are relevant to Centering are explained in Section 3, and the issues on utterance units are discussed Section 4. Section 5 shows the research procedure, and the results of the data analysis in Section 6 suggest that the matrix clause in a complex sentence be analyzed before the subordinate clause so that the better transition types are selected. Finally, a few further research topics are introduced that remain untouched in this paper.